LIBRARY
UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA
IRVINE
LITERARY FRIENDS
AND
ACQUAINTANCE
Kiustratfi
LITERARY FRIENDS
AND
ACQUAINTANCE
iTw
A PERSONAL RETROSPECT
OF AMERICAN AUTHORSHIP
W. D. HO WELLS
ILLUSTRATED
HARPER fir- BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
202°)
Copyright, igoo, 1911, by HARPER & BROTHERS
CONTENTS
PART PAGE
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL IX
I. MY FIKST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND 1
II. FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK ... 67
III. ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON 91
IV. LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT 113
V. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES 146
VI. THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW 178
VII. STUDIES OF LOWELL 212
VIII. CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS 251
IX. A BELATED GUEST 289
X. MY MARK TWAIN 307
ILLUSTRATIONS
W. D. HOWELLS, 1903 (PHOTOGRAVURE) Fr<mti*pi<™
JAMES T. FIELDS f«***P. 42
" 56
NVTHANIEL HAWTHORNE
it 1(54
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
" 1S^
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
" 212
J\MES RUSSELL LOWELL
" 308
MARK TWAIN
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
LONG before I began the papers whicH make up this
volume, I had meant to write of literary history in
New England as I had known it in the lives of its
great exemplars during the twenty-five years I lived
near them. In fact, I had meant to do this from the
time I came among them ; but I let the days in which
I almost constantly saw them go by without record save
such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond
the common, but not so full as I could have wished
when I began to invoke it for my work. Still, upon
insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient abundance;
and, though I now wish I could have remembered more
instances, I think my impressions were accurate enough.
I am sure of having tried honestly to impart them in
the ten years or more when I was desultorily en
deavoring to share them with the reader.
The papers were written pretty much in the order
they have here, beginning with My First Visit to New
EnglandjVfhich dates from the earliest eighteen-nineties,
if I may trust my recollection of reading it from the
manuscript to the editor of Harper's Magazine, where
we lay under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant
summer morning in the first years of that decade,
was printed no great while after in that periodical ; but
I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that
it had been anticipated in Harper's by other reminis
cences of him, and it was therefore first printed in
BIBLIOGEAPHICAL
Scribner's Magazine. It was the paper with which I
took the most pains, and when it was completed I still
felt it so incomplete that I referred it to his closest
and my best friend, the late Charles Eliot Norton, for
his criticism. He thought it wanting in unity ; it was a
group of studies instead of one study, he said; I must
do something to draw the different sketches together in
a single effect of portraiture; and this I did my best
to do.
It was the latest written of the three articles which
give the volume substance, and it represents more
finally and fully than the others my sense of the lit
erary importance of the men whose like wre shall not
look upon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest
poet of the three, Holmes often the most brilliant and
felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of his forays in politics,
was the finest scholar and the most profoundly literary,
as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly
]^ew England in quality.
While I was doing these sketches, sometimes slighter
and sometimes less slight, of all those poets and essay
ists and novelists I had known in Cambridge and Bos
ton and Concord and !N"ew York, I was doing many
other things : half a dozen novels, as many more novel
ettes and shorter stories, with essays and criticisms and
verses; so that in January, 1900, I had not yet done
the paper on Lowell, which, with another, was to com
plete my reminiscences of American literary life as I
had witnessed it. When they were all done at last
they were republished in a volume which found in
stant favor beyond my deserts if not its own.
There was a good deal of trouble with the name, but
Literary Friends and Acquaintance was an endeavor
for modest accuracy with which I remained satisfied
until I thought, long too late, of Literary Friends and
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
Neighbors. Then I perceived that this would have been
still more accurate and quite as modest, and I gladly
give any reader leave to call the book by that name
who likes.
Since the collection was first made, I have written
little else quite of the kind, except the paper on Bret
Harte, which was first printed shortly after his death;
and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been pre
paring to make for forty years and more, and wrote in
two weeks of the spring of 1910. Others of my time
and place have now passed whither there is neither
time nor place, and there are moments when I feel
that I must try to call them back and pay them such
honor as my sense of their worth may give; but the
impulse has as yet failed to effect itself, and I do not
know how long I shall spare myself the supreme pleasure-
pain, the "hochst angenehmer Schmerz," of seeking to
live here with those who live here no more.
W. D. H.
LITERARY FRIENDS
AND
ACQUAINTANCE
LITERARY
FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
part fffrst
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
IF there was any one in the world who had his being
more wholly in literature than I had in 1860, I
am sure I should not have known where to find him, and
I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres
of literary activity than I then was, or among those
more purely devoted to literature than myself. I had
been for three years a writer of news paragraphs, book
notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an in
land city, and I do not know that my life differed out
wardly from that of any other young journalist, who
had begun as I had in a country printing-office, and
might be supposed to be looking forward to advance
ment in his profession or in public affairs. But in
wardly it was altogether different with me. Inwardly
I was a poet, with no wish to be anything else,
unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far
forget myself as to be a novelist. I was, with my friend
J. J. Piatt, the half-author of a little volume of very
A 1
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
unknown verse, and Mr. Lowell had lately accepted and
had begun to print in the Atlantic Monthly five or six
poems of mine. Besides this I had written poems, and
sketches, and criticisms for the Saturday Press of New
York, a long-forgotten but once very lively expression
of literary intention in an extinct bohemia of that city;
and I was always writing poems, and sketches, and
criticisms in our own paper. These, as well as my feats
in the renowned periodicals of the East, met with kind
ness, if not honor, in my own city which ought to have
given me grave doubts whether I was any real prophet.
But it only intensified my literary ambition, already
so strong that my veins might well have run ink rather
than blood, and gave me a higher opinion of my
fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be. They were
indeed very charming people, and such of them as
I mostly saw were readers and lovers of books. So
ciety in Columbus at that day had a pleasant refine
ment which I think I do not exaggerate in the fond
retrospect. It had the finality which it seems to have
had nowhere since the war ; it had certain fixed ideals,
which were none the less graceful and becoming be
cause they were the simple old American ideals, now
vanished, or fast vanishing, before the knowledge of
good and evil as they have it in Europe, and as it has
imparted itself to American travel and sojourn. There
was a mixture of many strains in the capital of Ohio,
as there was throughout the State. Virginia, Ken
tucky, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England
all joined to characterize the manners and customs.
I suppose it was the South which gave the social tone ;
the intellectual taste among the elders was the South
ern taste for the classic and the standard in literature ;
but we who were younger preferred the modern au
thors : we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Haw-
2
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
thorne, and Charles Reade, and De Quincey, and Ten
nyson, and Browning, and Emerson, and Longfellow;
and I — I read Heine, and evermore Heine, when there
was not some new thing from the others. Now and
then an immediate French book penetrated to us: we
read Michelet and About, I remember. We looked to
England and the East largely for our literary opin
ions; we accepted the Saturday Review as law if
we could not quite receive it as gospel. One of us
took the Cornhill Magazine, because Thackeray was
the editor; the Atlantic Monthly counted many readers
among us ; and a visiting young lady from New Eng
land, who screamed at sight of the periodical in one
of our houses, " Why, have you got the Atlantic Month
ly out here?" could be answered, with cold superiority,
" There are several contributors to the Atlantic in
Columbus." There were in fact two : my room-mate,
who wrote Browning for it, while I wrote Heine and
Longfellow. But I suppose two are as rightfully sev
eral as twenty are.
II
That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then
a literiiry light from the East swam into our skies. I
heard and saw Emerson, and I once met Bayard Tay
lor socially, at the hospitable house where he was a
guest after his lecture. Heaven knows how I got
through the evening. I do not think I opened my
mouth to address him a word; it was as much as 1
could do to sit and look at him, while he tranquilly
smoked, and chatted with our host, and quaffed the
beer which we had very good in the West. All
while I did him homage as the first author by calling
whom I had met, I longed to tell him how much 1
liked his poems, which we used to get by heart in thos
3
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
days, and I longed (how much more I longed !) to have
him know that —
" Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren,"
that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly and
the Saturday Press, and was the potential author of
things destined to eclipse all literature hitherto at
tempted. But I could not tell him; and there was no
one else who thought to tell him. Perhaps it was as
well so; I might have perished of his recognition, for
my modesty was equal to my merit.
In fact I think we were all rather modest young
fellows, we who formed the group wont to spend some
part of every evening at that house, where there was
always music, or whist, or gay talk, or all three. We
had our opinions of literary matters, but (perhaps
because we had mostly accepted them from England
or ~New England, as I have said) we were not vain
of them ; and we would by no means have urged them
before a living literary man like that. I believe none
of us ventured to speak, except the poet, my roommate,
who said, He believed so and so was the original of so
and so ; and was promptly told, He had no right to say
such a thing. Naturally, we came away rather criti
cal of our host's guest, whom I afterwards knew as the
kindliest heart in the world. But we had not shone
in his presence, and that galled us; and we chose to
think that he had not shone in ours.
Ill
At that time he was filling a large space in the
thoughts of the young people who had any thoughts
about literature. He had come to his full repute as
an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still
4
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
wore the halo of his early adventures afoot in foreign
lands when they were yet really foreign. He had not
written his novels of American life, once so welcomed,
and now so forgotten; it wras very long before he
had achieved that incomparable translation of Faust
which must always remain the finest and best, and
which would keep his name alive with Goethe's, if he
had done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But.
what then most commended him to the regard of us
star-eyed youth (now blinking sadly toward our seven
ties) was the poetry which he printed in the magazines
from time to time : in the first Putnam's (where there
was a dashing picture of him in an Arab burnoose
and a turban), and in Harper's, and in the Atlantic.
It was often very lovely poetry, I thought, and I stil]
think so; and it was rightfully his, though it paid the
inevitable allegiance to the manner of the great mas
ters of the day. It was graced for us by the pathetic
romance of his early love, which some of its sweetest
and saddest numbers confessed, for the young girl he
married almost in her death hour; and we who were
hoping to have our hearts broken, or already had them
so, would have been glad of something more of the ob
vious poet in the popular lecturer we had seen refres
ino- himself after his hour on the platform.
He remained for nearly a year the only author .
had seen, and I met him once again before I saw any
other. Our second meeting was far from Columbus,
as far as remote Quebec, when I was on my way tc
New England by way of Niagara and the Canadian
fivers and cities^ I stopped in Toronto, and realized
ic i j - rUVi/vnt nnv siffnal adventures, out
myself abroad, wren -r-
at Montreal something very pretty happened to :ne.
came into the hotel office, the evening of a ft
lonely sight-seeing, and vamly explored the
5
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
for the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from
it two smartly dressed young fellows embraced it, and
1 heard one of them say, to my great amaze and hap
piness, " Hello, here's Howells !"
" Oh," I broke out upon him, " I was just looking
for some one I knew. I hope you are some one who
knows me!"
" Only through your contributions to the Saturday
Press," said the young fellow, and with these golden
words, the precious first personal recognition of my
authorship I had ever received from a stranger, and
the rich reward of all my literary endeavor, he intro
duced himself and his friend. I do not know what be
came of this friend, or where or how he eliminated
himself ; but we two others were inseparable from that
moment. He was a young lawyer from New York,
and when I came back from Italy, four or five years
later, I used to see his sign in Wall Street, with a
never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In
whatever world he happens now to be, I should like to
send him my greetings, and confess to him that my
art has never since brought me so sweet a recompense,
and nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, as
that outcry of his over the hotel register in Montreal.
We were comrades for four or five rich days, and
shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the
monuments of those ancient Canadian capitals, which
I think we valued at all their picturesque worth. We
made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled and
made giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of
love with all the pretty faces and dresses we saw; and
we talked evermore about literature and literary peo
ple. He had more acquaintance with the one, and
more passion for the other, but he could tell me of
Pfaffs lager-beer cellar on Broadway, where the
6
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
Saturday Press fellows and the other Bohemians met ;
and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved to visit
it as soon as I reached New York, in spite of the to
bacco and beer (which I was given to understand were
de rigueur), though they both, so far as I had known
them, were apt to make me sick.
I was very desolate after I parted from this good
fellow, who returned to Montreal on his way to New
York, while I remained in Quebec to continue later on
mine to Xew England. When I came in from seeing
him off in a calash for the boat, I discovered Bayard
Taylor in the reading-room, where he sat sunken in
what seemed a somewhat weary muse. He did not
know me, or even notice me, though I made several
errands in and out of the reading-room in the vain
hope that he might do so : doubly vain, for I am aware
now that I was still flown with the pride of that pretty
experience in Montreal, and trusted in a repetition
of something like it. At last, as no chance volunteered
to help me, I mustered courage to go up to him and
name myself, and say I had once had the pleasure
of meeting him at Doctor - -'a in Columbus. The
poet gave no sign of consciousness at the sound of a
name which I had fondly begun to think might not be
so all unknown. He looked up with an unkindling
eye, and asked, Ah, how was the Doctor? and when I
had reported favorably of the Doctor, our conversa
tion ended.
He was probably as tired as he looked, and he
have classed me with that multitude all over the coun
try who had shared the pleasure I professed in meet
ing him before; it was surely my fault that I did not
speak my name loud enough to be recognized i
spoke it at all ; but the courage I had mustered did not
quite suffice for that. In after years he assure
LITEKARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
first by letter and then by word, of his grief for an
incident which I can only recall now as the untoward
beginning of a cordial friendship. It was often my
privilege, in those days, as reviewer and editor, to tes
tify my sense of the beautiful things he did in so many
kinds of literature, but I never liked any of them bet
ter than I liked him. He had a fervent devotion to
his art, and he was always going to do the greatest
things in it, with an expectation of effect that never
failed him. The things he actually did were none of
them mean, or wanting in quality, and some of them
are of a lasting charm that any one may feel who will
turn to his poems; but no doubt many of them fell
short of his hopes of them with the reader. It was
fine to meet him when he was full of a new scheme ;
he talked of it with a single-hearted joy, and tried to
make you see it of the same colors and proportions it
wore to his eyes. He spared no toil to make it the
perfect thing he dreamed it, and he was not discour
aged by any disappointment he suffered with the critic
or the public.
He was a tireless worker, and at last his health
failed under his labors at the newspaper desk, beneath
the midnight gas, when he should long have rested
from such labors. I believe he was obliged to do them
through one of those business fortuities which deform
and embitter all our lives; but he was not the man to
spare himself in any case. He was always attempting
new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make
his scholarship reparation for the want of earlier op
portunity and training. I remember that I met him
once in a Cambridge street with a book in his hand
which he let me take in mine. It was a Greek author,
and he said he was just beginning to read the language
at fifty: a patriarchal age to me of the early thirties!
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking
it up so late in the day, for he said, with charming
seriousness, " Oh, but you know, I expect to use it in
the other world." Yes, that made it worth while, I
consented ; but was he sure of the other world ? " As
sure as I am of this," he said ; and I have always kept
the impression of the young faith which spoke in his
voice and was more than his words.
I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous
adieux which were paid him in New York before he
sailed to be minister in Germany. It was one of the most
graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of
all our Presidents after Lincoln, honored himself in hon
oring literature by his appointments, to give that place
to Bayard Taylor. There was no one more fit for it, and
it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguished
to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and
the service he had done German letters. He was as
happy in it, apparently, as a man could be in anything
here below, and he enjoyed to the last drop the many
cups of kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though
I believe these farewells, at a time when he was al
ready fagged with work and excitement, were notably
harmful to him, and helped to hasten his end. Some
of us who were near of friendship went down to see
him off when he sailed, as the dismal and futile wont
of friends is; and I recall the kind, great fellow stand
ing in the cabin, amid those sad flowers that heaped the
tables, saying good-by to one after another, and smiling
fondly, smiling wearily, upon all. There was cham
pagne, of course, and an odious hilarity, without mea
ing and without remission, till the warning bell chased
us ashore, and our brave poet escaped with what was
of his life.
9
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
rv
I have followed him far from the moment of our
first meeting; but even on my way to venerate those
i^ew England luminaries, which chiefly drew my eyes,
I could not pay a less devoir to an author who, if Cur
tis was not, was chief of the New York group of au
thors in that day. I distinguished between the New-
Englanders and the New-Yorkers, and I suppose there
is no question but our literary centre was then in Bos
ton, wherever it is, or is not, at present. But I thought
Taylor then, and I think him now, one of the first in
our whole American province of the republic of letters,
in a day when it was in a recognizably flourishing
state, whether we regard quantity or quality in the
names that gave it lustre. Lowell was then in
perfect command of those varied forces which will
long, if not lastingly, keep him in memory as first
among our literary men, and master in more kinds
than any other American. Longfellow was in the ful
ness of his world-wide fame, and in the ripeness of the
beautiful genius which was not to know decay while
life endured. Emerson had emerged from the popu
lar darkness which had so long held him a hopeless
mystic, and was shining a lambent star of poesy and
prophecy at the zenith. Hawthorne, the exquisite
artist, the unrivalled dreamer, whom we still always
liken this one and that one to, whenever this one or
that one promises greatly to please us, and still leave
without a rival, without a companion, had lately re
turned from his long sojourn abroad, and had given
us the last of the incomparable romances which the
world was to have perfect from his hand. Doctor
Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who
10
MY FIKST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
most admired his brilliant humor and charming poetry
by the invention of a new attitude if not a new sort
in literature. The turn that civic affairs had taken
was favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier's
splendid lyrical gift; and that heart of fire, doubly
snow-bound by Quaker tradition and Puritan environ
ment, was penetrating every generous breast with its
flamy impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble pur
pose. Mrs. Stowe, who far outfamed the rest as the
author of the most renowned novel ever written, was
proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction she
was still writing.
This great ISTew England group might be enlarged
perhaps without loss of quality by the inclusion of
Thoreau, who came somewhat before his time, and
whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly
futile civilization would find more intelligent accept
ance now than it did then, when all resentment of its
defects was specialized in enmity to Southern slavery.
Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too,
by virtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most
fantastic, the sanest, the sweetest, the truest, which
had begun to find expression in the Atlantic Monthly;
and there a wonderful young girl had written a series
of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth every
where with amaze and joy, so that I thought it would
be no less an event to meet Harriet Prescott than to me
anv of those I have named.
I expected somehow to meet them all, and
ined them all easily accessible in the office of the At
Untie Monthly, which had lately adventured m the
fine air of high literature where so many other peri
odical had gasped and died before it The best of
these, hitherto, and better even than the A tlaniic or
some reasons, the lamented Putnam's Maga*u*< had
11
LITEEARY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
perished of inanition at New York, and the claim of
the commercial capital to the literary primacy had
passed with that brilliant venture. New York had
nothing distinctive to show for American literature
but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker Magazine.
Harper s New Monthly, though Curtis had already
come to it from the wreck of Putnam's, and it had long
ceased to be eclectic in material, and had begun to
stand for native work in the allied arts which it has
since so magnificently advanced, was not distinctively
literary, and the Weekly had just begun to make itself
known. The Century, Scribners, the Cosmopolitan,
McClure's, and I know not what others, were still un-
imagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the
Galaxy was to flash and fade before any of them
should kindle its more effectual fires. The Nation,
which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our
young literature, had still six years of dreamless po
tentiality before it; and the Nation was always more
Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, whatever it
was by nativity.
Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the
literary field. Graham's Magazine at one time show
ed a certain critical force, but it seemed to perish of
this expression of vitality; and there remained Godey's
Lady's Boole and Peterson s Magazine, publications
really incredible in their insipidity. In the South
there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal, with the
moral principles all standing on their heads in defence
of slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and
foolish notion that Western talent was repressed by
Eastern jealousy. At Boston chiefly, if not at Boston
alone, was there a vigorous intellectual life among
such authors as I have named. Every young writer
was ambitious to join his name with theirs in the
12
MY FIKST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
Atlantic Monthly, and in the lists of Ticknor £
Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such
as the business world has known nowhere else before
or since. Their imprint was a warrant of quality to
the reader and of immortality to the author, so that
if I could have had a book issued by them at that
day I should now be in the full enjoyment of an un
dying fame.
Such was the literary situation as the passionate
pilgrim from the West approached his holy land at
Boston, by way of the Grand Trunk Kailway from
Quebec to Portland. I have no recollection of a sleep
ing-car, and I suppose I waked and watched during the
whole of that long, rough journey; but I should hardly
have slept if there had been a car for the purpose,
was too eager to see what New England was like, and
too anxious not to lose the least glimpse of it, to close
my eyes after I crossed the border at Island Pond.
I found that in the elm-dotted levels of Maine it was
very like the Western Keserve in northern Ohio, which
is, indeed, a portion of New England transferred wil
all its characteristic features, and flattened out along
the lake shore. It was not till I began to run soutl
ward into the older regions of the country that
this look, and became gratefully strange to me.
never had the effect of hoary antiquity which I
pected of a country settled more than two centu
with its wood-built farms and villages it looked newer
than the coal-smoked brick of southern Ohio I had
prefigured the New England landscape bare of
relieved here and there with the trees of orchard,, or
plantations; but I found apparently as much *oc
as at home.
13
LITEKAKY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
At Portland I first saw the ocean, and this was a
sort of disappointment. Tides and salt water I had
already had at Quebec, so that I was no longer on the
alert for them; but the color and the vastness of the
sea I was still to try upon my vision. When I stood
on the Promenade at Portland with the kind young
Unitarian minister whom I had brought a letter to,
and who led me there for a most impressive first view
of the ocean, I could not make more of it than there
was of Lake Erie; and I have never thought the color
of the sea comparable to the tender blue of the lake.
I did not hint my disappointment to my friend;
I had too much regard for the feelings of an Eastern
man to decry his ocean to his face, and I felt besides
that it would be vulgar and provincial to make com
parisons. I am glad now that I held my tongue, for
that kind soul is no longer in this world, and I should
not like to think he knew how far short of my expec
tations the sea he was so proud of had fallen. I went
up with him into a tower or belvedere there was at
hand; and when he pointed to the eastern horizon and
said, Now there was nothing but sea between us and
Africa, I pretended to expand with the thought, and
began to sound myself for the emotions which I ought
to have felt at such a sight. But in my heart I was
empty, and Heaven knows whether I saw the steamer
which the ancient mariner in charge of that tower in
vited me to look at through his telescope. I never
could see anything but a vitreous glare through a tele
scope, which has a vicious habit of dodging about
through space, and failing to bring down anything
of less than planetary magnitude.
But there was something at Portland vastly more
to me than seas or continents, and that was the house
where Longfellow was born. I believe, now, I did not
14
MY FIEST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
get the right house, but only the house he went to live
in later ; but it served, and I rejoiced in it with a rap
ture that could not have been more genuine if it had
been the real birthplace of the poet. I got my friend
to show me
" — the breezy dome of groves,
The shadows of Deering's woods,"
because they were in one of Longfellow's loveliest and
tenderest poems; and I made an errand to the docks,
for the sake of the
" — black wharves and the slips,
And the sea-tides tossing free,
And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
And the magic of the sea,"
mainly for the reason that these were colors and shapes
of the fond vision of the poet's past. I am in doubt
whether it was at this time or a later time that I went
to revere
" — the dead captains as they lay
In their graves o'erlooking the tranquil bay,
Where they in battle died,"
but I am quite sure it was now that I wandered under
"—the trees which shadow each well-known street,
As they balance up and down,"
for when I was next in Portland the great fire had
swept the city avenues bare of most of those beautiful
elms, whose Gothic arches and traceries I well remen
riPT*
The fact is that in those days I was bursting with
the most romantic expectations of life in every way,
and I looked at the whole world as material that migh
be turned into literature, or that might be associated
LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
with it somehow. I do not know how I managed to
keep these preposterous hopes within me, but perhaps
the trick of satirizing them, which I had early learnt,
helped me to do it. I was at that particular moment
resolved above all things to see things as Heinrich
Heine saw them, or at least to report them as he did,
no matter how I saw them; and I went about framing
phrases to this end, and trying to match the objects of
interest to them whenever there was the least chance
of getting them together.
VI
I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or
whether it was before or after I had passed a day or
two in Salem. As Salem is on the way from Port
land, I will suppose that I stopped there first, and ex
plored the quaint old town (quainter then than now,
but still quaint enough) for the memorials of Haw
thorne and of the witches which united to form the
Salem I cared for. I went and looked up the House
of Seven Gables, and suffered an unreasonable disap
pointment that it had not a great many more of them ;
but there was no loss in the death-warrant of Bridget
Bishop, with the sheriff's return of execution upon it,
which I found at the Court-house; if anything, the
pathos of that witness of one of the cruelest delusions
in the world was rather in excess of my needs; I could
have got on with less. I saw the pins which the
witches were sworn to have thrust into the afflicted
children, and I saw Gallows Hill, where the hapless
victims of the perjury were hanged. But that death-
warrant remained the most vivid color of my experi
ence of the tragedy; I had no need to invite myself to
a sense of it, and it is still like a stain of red in my
memory.
16
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
The kind old ship's captain whose guest I was, and
who was transfigured to poetry in my sense by the
fact that he used to voyage to the African coast for
palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town,
and showed me the Custom-house, which I desired
to see because it wras in the preface to the Scarlet Let
ter. But I perceived that he did not share my enthusi
asm for the author, and I became more and more sen
sible that in Salem air there was a cool undercurrent
of feeling about him. ISTo doubt the place was not
altogether grateful for the celebrity his romance had
given it, and would have valued more the uninterrupt
ed quiet of its own flattering thoughts of itself; but
when it came to hearing a young lady say she knew a
girl who said she would like to poison Hawthorne,
it seemed to the devout young pilgrim from the West
that something more of love for the great romancer
would not have been too much for him. Hawthorne
had already had his say, however, and he had not used
his native town with any great tenderness. Indeed,
the advantages to any place of having a great genius
born and reared in its midst are so doubtful that it
might be well for localities designing to become the
birthplaces of distinguished authors to think twice
about it. Perhaps only the largest capitals, like Lon
don and Paris, and New York and Chicago, ought to
risk it. But the authors have an unaccountable per
versity, and will seldom come into the world in _tho
large cities, which are alone without the sense of neigh
borhood, and the personal susceptibilities so unfavoi
able to the practice of the literary art.
I dare say that it was owing to the local mdii
to her greatest name, or her reluctance from it, that
got a clearer impression of Salem in some other respe<
than I should have had if I had been invited there to
17
devote myself solely to the associations of Hawthorne.
For the first time I saw an old ISTew England town,
I do not know but the most characteristic, and took
into my young Western consciousness the fact of a
more complex civilization than I had yet known. My
whole life had been passed in a region where men were
just beginning ancestors, and the conception of family
was very imperfect. Literature, of course, was full of
it, and it was not for a devotee of Thackeray to be theo
retically ignorant of its manifestations; but I had
hitherto carelessly supposed that family was nowhere
regarded seriously in America except in Virginia,
where it furnished a joke for the rest of the nation.
But now I found myself confronted with it in its an
cient houses, and heard its names pronounced with a
certain consideration, which I dare say was as much
their due in Salem as it could be anywhere. The
names were all strange, and all indifferent to me, but
those fine square wooden mansions, of a tasteful archi
tecture, and a pale buff-color, withdrawing themselves
in quiet reserve from the quiet street, gave me an im
pression of family as an actuality and a force which
I had never had before, but which no Westerner can
yet understand the East without taking into account.
I do not suppose that I conceived of family as a fact
of vital import then; I think I rather regarded it as
a color to be used in any aesthetic study of the local
conditions. I am not sure that I valued it more even
for literary purposes, than the steeple which the cap
tain pointed out as the first and last thing he saw when
he came and went on his long voyages, or than the
great palm-oil casks, which he showed me, and which
I related to the tree that stood
" Auf brennender Felsenwand."
IS
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
Whether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil,
or was a sort only suitable to be the dream of a lonely
fir-tree in the North on a cold height, I am in doubt
to this day.
I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring
industry of Lynn was penetrating Salem, and that
the ancient haunt of the witches and the birthplace
of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a
great shoe-town ; but my concern was less for its mem
ories and sensibilities than for an odious duty which I
owed that industry, together with all the others in New
England. Before I left home I had promised my ear
liest publisher that I would undertake to edit, or com
pile, or do something literary to, a work on the oper
ation of the more distinctive mechanical inventions
of our country, which he had conceived the notion
of publishing by subscription. He had furnished me,
the most immechanical of humankind, with a letter
addressed generally to the great mills and factories
of the East, entreating their managers to unfold their
mysteries to me for the purposes of this volume. His
letter had the effect of shutting up some of them like
clams, and others it put upon their guard against my
researches, lest I should seize the secret of their special
inventions and publish it to the world. I could not
tell the managers that I was both morally and mentally
incapable of this; that they might have explained and
demonstrated the properties and functions of their
most recondite machinery, and upon examinati<
afterwards found me guiltless of having anything
a few verses of Heine or Tennyson or Longfellow i
my head So I had to suffer in several places
their unjust anxieties, and from my own wearmes
of their ingenious engines, or else endure the pai
of a bad conscience from ignoring them. As
3 19
I was in Canada I was happy, for there was no indus
try in Canada that I saw, except that of the peasant
girls, in their Evangeline hats and kirtles, tossing
the hay in the way-side fields; but when I reached
Portland my troubles began. I went with that young
minister of whom I have spoken to a large foundry,
where they were casting some sort of ironmongery,
and inspected the process from a distance beyond any
chance spurt of the molten metal, and came away sadly
uncertain of putting the rather fine spectacle to any
practical use. A manufactory where they did some
thing with coal-oil (which I now heard for the first
time called kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said
to myself that probably all the other industries of Port
land were as reserved, and I would not seek to explore
them; but when I got to Salem, my conscience stirred
again. If I knew that there were shoe-shops in Salem,
ought not I to go and inspect their processes? This
was a question which would not answer itself to my
satisfaction, and I had no peace till I learned that I
could see shoemaking much better at Lynn, and that
Lynn was such a little way from Boston that I could
readily run up there, if I did not wish to examine the
shoe machinery at once. I promised myself that I
would run up from Boston, but in order to do this I
must first go to Boston.
VII
I am supposing still tHat I saw Salem before I saw
Boston, but however the fact may be, I am sure that I
decided it would be better to see shoemaking in Lynn,
where I really did see it, thirty years later. For the
purposes of the present visit, I contented myself with
looking at a machine in Haverhill, which chewed a
20
shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped it out of its iron jaws
with an indifference as great as my own, and probably
as little sense of how it had done its work. I may be
unjust to that machine ; Heaven knows I would not
wrong it ; and I must confess that my head had no room
in it for the conception of any machinery but the myth
ological, which also I despised, in my revulsion from
the eighteenth-century poets to those of my own day.
I cannot quite make out after the lapse of so many
years just how or when I got to Haverhill, or whether
it was before or after I had been in Salem. There is an
apparitional quality in my presences, at this point or
that, in the dim past ; but I hope that, for the credit of
their order, ghosts are not commonly taken with sucli
trivial things as I was. For instance, in Haverhill I
was much interested by the sight of a young man, com
ing gayly down the steps of the hotel where I lodged, in
peg-top trousers so much more peg-top than my own that
I seemed to be wearing mere spring-bottoms in com
parison; and in a day when every one who respected
himself had a necktie as narrow as he could get, this
youth had one no wider than a shoestring, and red at
that, while mine measured almost an inch, and was
black. To be sure, he was one of a band of negro min
strels, who were to give a concert that night, and he
had a right to excel in fashion.
I will suppose, for convenience' sake, that I visited
Haverhill, too, before I reached Boston : somehow that
shoe-pegging machine must come in, and it may as well
come in here. When I actually found myself in Boston,
there were perhaps industries which it would have been
well for me to celebrate, but I either made believe then
were none, or else I honestly forgot all about them. In
either case I released myself altogether to the literal
and historical associations of the place. I need not say
21
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
that I gave myself first to the first, and it rather sur
prised me to find that the literary associations of Bos
ton referred so largely to Cambridge. I did not know
much about Cambridge, except that it was the seat of
the university where Lowell was, and Longfellow had
been, professor; and somehow I had not realized it as
the home of these poets. That was rather stupid of me,
but it is best to own the truth, and afterward I came to
know the place so well that I may safely confess my
earlier ignorance.
I had stopped in Boston at the Tremont House,
which was still one of the first hostelries of the country,
and I must have inquired my way to Cambridge there ;
but I was sceptical of the direction the Cambridge
horse-car took when I found it, and I hinted to the
driver my anxieties as to why he should be starting
east when I had been told that Cambridge was west of
Boston. He reassured me in the laconic and sarcastic
manner of his kind, and we really reached Cambridge
by the route he had taken.
The beautiful elms that shaded great part of the way
massed themselves in the " groves of academe " at the
Square, and showed pleasant glimpses of " Old Har
vard's scholar factories red," then far fewer than now.
It must have been in vacation, for I met no one as I
wandered through the college yard, trying to make up
my mind as to how I should learn where Lowell lived ;
for it was he whom I had come to find. He had not
only taken the poems I sent him, but he had printed
two of them in a single number of the Atlantic, and had
even written me a little note about them, which I wore
next my heart in my breast pocket till I almost wore it
out; and so I thought I might fitly report myself to
him. But I have always been helpless in finding my
way, and I was still depressed by my failure to con-
22
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
vince the horse-car driver that he had taken the wrong
road. I let several people go by without questioning
them, and those I did ask abashed me farther by not
knowing what I wanted to know. When I had remitted
my search for the moment, an ancient man, with an
open mouth and an inquiring eye, whom I never after
wards made out in Cambridge, addressed me with a
hospitable offer to show me the Washington Elm. I
thought this would give me time to embolden myself
for the meeting with the editor of the Atlantic if I
should ever find him, and I went with that kind old
man, who when he had shown me the tree, and the spot
where Washington stood wrhen he took command of the
Continental forces, said that he had a branch of it, and
that if I would come to his house with him he would
give me a piece. In the end, I meant merely to flatter
him into telling me where I could find Lowell, but I
dissembled my purpose and pretended a passion for a
piece of the historic elm, and the old man led me not
only to his house but his wood-house, where he sawed
me off a block so generous that I could not get it into
my pocket. I feigned the gratitude which I could sec
that he expected, and then I took courage to put my
question to him. Perhaps that patriarch lived only in
the past, and cared for history and not literature. He
confessed that he could not tell me where to find Lowell ;
but he did not forsake me ; he set forth with me upon
the street again, and let no man pass without asking
him. In the end we met one who was able to say where
Mr. Lowell was, and I found him at last in a little
study at the rear of a pleasant, old-fashioned house near
the Delta.
Lowell was not then at the height of
had just reached this thirty years after, when he died
but I doubt if he was ever after a greater power in his
23
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
own country, or more completely embodied the literary
aspiration which would not and could not part itself
from the love of frqedom and the hope of justice. For
the sake of these he had been willing to suffer the re
proach which followed their friends in the earlier days
of the anti-slavery struggle. He had outlived the re
proach long before; but the fear of his strength re
mained with those who had felt it, and he had not made
himself more generally loved by the Fable for Critics
than by the Biglow Papers, probably. But in the
Vision of Sir Launfal and the Legend of Brittany
he had won a liking if not a listening far wider than his
humor and his wit had got him ; and in his lectures on
the English poets, given not many years before he came
to the charge of the Atlantic, he had proved himself
easily the wisest and finest critic in our language. He
was already, more than any American poet,
" Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love,"
and he held a place in the public sense which no other
author among us has held. I had myself never been
a great reader of his poetry, when I met him, though
when I was a boy of ten years I had heard my father
repeat passages from the Biglow Papers against war
and slavery and the war for slavery upon Mexico, and
later I had read those criticisms of English poetry, and
I knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort; but
my love for him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love
for his tender rhyme, Auf Wiedersehen, which I can
not yet read without something of the young pathos it
first stirred in me. I knew and felt his greatness some
how apart from the literary proofs of it; he ruled my
fancy and held my allegiance as a character, as a man ;
and I am neither sorry nor ashamed that I was abashed
24
MY FIEST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
when I first came into his presence; and that in spite
of his words of welcome I sat inwardly quaking before
him. He was then forty-one years old, and nineteen
my senior, and if there had been nothing else to awe
me, I might well have been quelled by the disparity of
our ages. But I have always been willing and even
eager to do homage to men who have done something,
and notably to men who have done something in the
sort I wished to do something in, myself. I could
never recognize any other sort of superiority; but that
I am proud to recognize ; and I had before Lowell some
such feeling as an obscure subaltern might have before
his general. He was by nature a bit of a disciplinarian,
and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare
say he let me feel whatever difference there was as
helplessly as I felt it. At the first encounter with
people he always was apt to have a certain frosty shy
ness, a smiling cold, as from the long, high-sunned win
ters of his Puritan race; he was not quite himself till
he had made you aware of his quality: then no one
could be sweeter, tenderer, warmer than he; then he
made you free of his whole heart ; but you must be his
captive before he could do that. His whole personality
had now an instant charm for me; I could not keep
my eyes from those beautiful eyes of his, which had a
certain starry serenity, and looked out so purely from
under his white forehead, shadowed with auburn hair
untouched by age; or from the smile that shaped the
auburn beard, and gave the face in its form and «
the Christ-look which Page's portrait has flattered in il
His voice had as great a fascination for me as his
face The vibrant tenderness and the crisp clearnes
the tones, the perfect modulation, the clear enuncia
the exquisite accent, the elect diction-
enough then to know that these were the gifts, t
25
were the graces, of one from whose tongue our rough
English came music such as I should never hear from
any other. In this speech there was nothing of our
slipshod American slovenliness, but a truly Italian
conscience and an artistic sense of beauty in the in
strument.
I saw, before he sat down across his writing-table
from me, that he was not far from the medium height ;
but his erect carriage made the most of his five feet and
odd inches. He had been smoking the pipe he loved,
and he put it back in his mouth, presently, as if he
found himself at greater ease with it, when he began
to chat, or rather to let me show what manner of young
man I was by giving me the first word. I told him of
the trouble I had in finding him, and I could not help
dragging in something about Heine's search for Borne,
when he went to see him in Frankfort; but I felt at
once this was a false start, for Lowell was such an im
passioned lover of Cambridge, which was truly his
patria. in the Italian sense, that it must have hurt him
to be unknown to any one in it ; he said, a little dryly,
that he should not have thought I would have so much
difficulty; but he added, forgivingly, that this was not
his own house, which he was out of for the time. Then
he spoke to me of Heine, and when I showed my ardor
for him, he sought to temper it with some judicious
criticisms, and told me that he had kept the first poem
I sent him, for the long time it had been unacknowl
edged, to make sure that it was not a translation. He
asked me about myself, and my name, and its Welsh
origin, and seemed to find the vanity I had in this
harmless enough. When I said I had tried hard to be
lieve that I was at least the literary descendant of Sir
James Howels, he corrected me gently with " James
Howel," and took down a volume of the Familiar Let'
2Q
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
ters from the shelves behind him to prove me wrong.
This was always his habit, as I found afterwards:
when he quoted anything from a book he liked to get
it and read the passage over, as if he tasted a kind of
hoarded sweetness in the words. It visibly vexed him
if they showed him in the least mistaken ; biit
" The love he bore to learning was at fault "
for this foible, and that other of setting people right if
he thought them wrong. I could not assert myself
against his version of Howel's name, for my edition of
his letters was far away in Ohio, and I was obliged to
own that the name was spelt in several different ways
in it. He perceived, no doubt, why I had chosen the
form likest my own, with the title which the pleasant
old turncoat ought to have had from the many masters
he served according to their many minds, but never
had except from that erring edition. He did not af
flict me for it, though; probably it amused him too
much ; he asked me about the West, and when he found
that I was as proud of the West as I was of Wales, ho
seemed even better pleased, and said he had always
fancied that human nature was laid out on rather a
larger scale there than in the East, but he had seen very
little of the West. In my heart I did not think this then,
and I do not think it now ; human nature has had more
ground to spread over in the West ; that is all ; but " it
was not for me to- bandy words with my sovereign."
He said he liked to hear of the differences between the
different sections, for what we had most to fear in our
country was a wearisome sameness of type.
He did not say now, or at any other time during the
many years I knew him, any of those slighting things
of the West which I had so often to suffer from Eastern
people, but suffered me to praise it all I would.
27
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
asked me what way I had taken in coming to New Eng«
land, and when I told him, and began to rave of the
beauty and quaintness of French Canada, and to pour
out my joy in Quebec, he said, with a smile that had
now lost all its frost, Yes, Quebec was a bit of the
seventeenth century; it was in many ways more French
than France, and its people spoke the language of Vol
taire, with the accent of Voltaire's time.
I do not remember what else he talked of, though
once I remembered it with what I believed an inef
faceable distinctness. I set nothing of it down at the
time ; I was too busy with the letters I was writing for
a Cincinnati paper ; and I was severely bent upon keep
ing all personalities out of them. This was very well,
but I could wish now that I had transgressed at least
so far as to report some of the things that Lowell said ;
for the paper did not print my letters, and it would
have been perfectly safe, and very useful for the present
purpose. But perhaps he did not say anything very
memorable; to do that you must have something posi
tive in your listener ; and I was the mere response, the
hollow echo, that youth must be in like circumstances.
I was all the time afraid of wearing my welcome out,
and I hurried to go when I would so gladly have staid.
,1 do not remember where I meant to go, or why he
should have undertaken to show me the way across-lots,
but this was what he did ; and when we came to a fence,
which I clambered grace] essly over, he put his hands
on the top, and tried to take it at a bound. He tried
twice, and then laughed at his failure, but not with
any great pleasure, and he was not content till a
third trial carried him across. Then he said, " I
commonly do that the first time," as if it were a
frequent habit with him, while I remained discreetly
silent, and for that moment at least felt myself the
28
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
elder of the man who had so much of the boy in him
He had, indeed, much of the boy in him to the last, and
he parted with each hour of his youth reluctantly pa
thetically.
VIII
We walked across what must have been Jarvis Field
to what must have been North Avenue, and there he left
me. But before he let me go he held my hand while he
could say that he wished me to dine with him ; only, he
was not in his own house, and he would ask me to dine
with him at the Parker House in Boston, and would
send me word of the time later.
I suppose I may have spent part of the intervening
time in viewing the wonders of Boston, and visiting the
historic scenes and places in it and about it. I certainly
went over to Charlestown, and ascended Bunker Hill
Monument, and explored the navy-yard, where the im
memorial man-of-war begun in Jackson's time was then
silently stretching itself under its long shed in a poetic
arrest, as if the failure of the appropriation for its com
pletion had been some kind of enchantment. In Bos
ton, I early presented my letter of credit to the pub
lisher it was drawn upon, not that I needed money at
the moment, but from a young eagerness to see if it
would be honored; and a literary attache of the house
kindly went about with me, and showed me the life of
the city. A great city it seemed to me then, and a seeth
ing vortex of business as well as a whirl of gayety, as
I saw it in Washington Street, and in a promenade con
cert at Copeland's restaurant in Tremont Row. Proba
bly I brought some idealizing force to bear upon it, for
I was not all so strange to the world as I must seem ;
perhaps I accounted for quality as well as quantity in
my impressions of the Xew England metropolis, and
29.
LITERAKY EKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
aggrandized it in the ratio of its literary importance.
It seemed to me old, even after Quebec, and very likely
I credited the actual town with all the dead and gone
Bostonians in my sentimental census. If I did not, it
was no fault of my cicerone, who thought even more
of the city he showed me than I did. I do not know
now who he was, and I never saw him after I came to
live there, with any certainty that it was he, though I
was often tormented with the vision of a spectacled
face like his, but not like enough to warrant me in ad
dressing him.
He became part of that ghostly Boston of my first
visit, which would sometimes return and possess again
the city I came to know so familiarly in later years,
and to be so passionately interested in. Some color of
my prime impressions has tinged the fictitious experi
ences of people in my books, but I find very little of it
in my memory. This is like a web of frayed old lace,
which I have to take carefully into my hold for fear of
its fragility, and make out as best I can the figure once
so distinct in it. There are the narrow streets, stretch
ing saltwards to the docks, which I haunted for their
quaintness, and there is Faneuil Hall, which I cared
to see so much more because Wendell Phillips had
spoken in it than because Otis and Adams had. There
is the old Colonial House, and there is the State House,
which I dare say I explored, with the Common sloping
before it. There is Beacon Street, with the Hancock
House where it is incredibly no more, and there are
the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue, and the
other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their base
ments left hollowed in the made land, which the gravel
trains were yet making out of the westward hills. There
is the Public Garden, newly planned and planted, but
without the massive bridge destined to make so ungrate-
30
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
fully little of the lake that occasioned it. But it is all
very vague, and I could easily believe now that it Avas
some one else who saw it then in my place.
I think that I did not try to see Cambridge the same
day that I saw Lowell, but wisely came back to my
hotel in Boston, and tried to realize the fact. I went
out another day, with an acquaintance from Ohio, whom
I ran upon in the street. We went to Mount Auburn
together, and I viewed its monuments with a reverence
which I dare say their artistic quality did not merit.
But I am not sorry for this, for perhaps they are not
quite so bad as some people pretend. The Gothic chapel
of the cemetery, unstoried as it was, gave me, with its
half-dozen statues standing or sitting about, an emotion
such as I am afraid I could not receive now from the
Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and Santa Croce in one.
I tried hard for some assthetic sense of it, and I made
believe that I thought this thing and that thing in the
place moved me with its fitness or beauty ; but the truth
is that I had no taste in anything but literature, and
did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experi
enced.
I did genuinely love the elmy quiet of the dear old
Cambridge streets, though, and I had a real and instant
pleasure 'in the yellow colonial houses, with their white
corners and casements and their green blinds, that
lurked behind the shrubbery of the avenue I passed
through to Mount Auburn. The most beautiful among
them was the most interesting for me, for it was the
house of Longfellow; my companion, who had seen
before, pointed it out to me with an air of custom and
I would not let him see that I valued the first sight ,
it as I did. I had hoped that somehow I might be £
favored as to see Longfellow himself, but when I askc
about him of those who knew, they said, Oh, he i
31
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Nahant," and I thought that Nahant must be a great
way off, and at any rate I did not feel authorized to go
to him there. Neither did I go to see the author of The
Amber Gocfo,who lived at Newburyport, I was told, as if
I should know where Newburyport was ; I did not know,
and I hated to ask. Besides, it did not seem so simple
as it had seemed in Ohio, to go and see a young lady
simply because I was infatuated with her literature;
even as the envoy of all the infatuated young people of
Columbus, I could not quite do this; and when I got
home, I had to account for my failure as best I could.
Another failure of mine was the sight of Whittier,
which I then very much longed to have. They said,
" Oh, Whittier lives at Amesbury," but that put him at
an indefinite distance, and without the introduction I
never would ask for, I found it impossible to set out in
quest of him. In the end, I saw no one in New Eng
land whom I was not presented to in the regular way,
except Lowell, whom I thought I had a right to call
upon in my quality of contributor, and from the
acquaintance I had with him by letter. I neither praise
nor blame myself for this ; it was my shyness that with
held me rather than my merit. There is really no harm
in seeking the presence of a famous man, and I doubt if
the famous man resents the wish of people to look upon
him without some measure, great or little, of affectation.
There are bores everywhere, but he is likelier to find
them in the wonted figures of society than in those
young people, or old people, who come to him in the
love of what he has done. I am well aware how furi
ously Tennyson sometimes met his worshippers, and
how insolently Carlyle, but I think these facts are little
specks in their sincerity. Our own gentler and honester
celebrities did not forbid approach, and I have known
some of them caress adorers who seemed hardly worthy
32
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
of their kindness ; but that was hetter than to have hurt
any sensitive spirit who had ventured too far, by the
rules that govern us with common men.
IX
My business relations were with the house that so
promptly honored my letter of credit. This house
had published in the East the campaign life of Lincoln
which I had lately written, and I dare say would have
published the volume of poems I had written earlier
with my friend Piatt, if there had been any public
for it; at least, I saw large numbers of the book on
the counters. But all my literary affiliations were
with Ticknor & Fields, and it was the Old Corner
Book-Store on Washington Street that drew my heart
as soon as I had replenished my pocket in Cornhill.
After verifying the editor of the Atlantic Monthly I
wished to verify its publishers, and it very fitly hap
pened that when I was shown into Mr. Fields's little
room at the back of the store, with its window looking
upon School Street, and its scholarly keeping in books
and prints, he had just got the magazine sheets of a
poem of mine from the Cambridge printers. He was
then lately from abroad, and he had the zest for Ameri
can things which a foreign sojourn is apt to renew in
us, though I did not know this then, and could not ac
count for it in the kindness he expressed for my poem.
He introduced me to Mr. Ticknor, who I fancied had
not read my poem; but he seemed to know what it was
from the junior partner, and he asked me whether J
had been paid for it. I confessed that I had not and
then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took froi
it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the grec
cloth top of the desk, in much the shape and of much
33
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
the size of the Great Bear. I have never since felt
myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though
I have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five
dollars that dazzled me in this constellation. The
publisher seemed aware of the poetic character of the
transaction; he let the pieces lie a moment, before he
gathered them up and put them into my hand, and
said, " I always think it is pleasant to have it in gold."
But a terrible experience with the poem awaited me,
and quenched for the moment all my pleasure and
pride. It was The Pilot's Story, which I suppose has
had as much acceptance as anything of mine in verse
(I do not boast of a vast acceptance for it), and I had
attempted to treat in it a phase of the national trag
edy of slavery, as I had imagined it on a Mississippi
steamboat. A young planter has gambled away the
slave-girl who is the mother of his child, and when
he tells her, she breaks out upon him with the demand :
" What will you say to our boy when he cries for me, there in
Saint Louis?"
I had thought this very well, and natural and sim
ple, but a fatal proof-reader had not thought it well
enough, or simple and natural enough, and he had
made the line read:
" What will you say to our boy when he cries for ' Ma,' there
in Saint Louis?"
He had even had the inspiration to quote the word
he preferred to the one I had written, so that there was
no merciful possibility of mistaking it for a misprint,
and my blood froze in my veins at sight of it. Mr.
Fields had given me the sheets to read while he looked
over some letters, and he either felt the chill of my
horror, or I made some sign or sound of dismay that
caught his notice, for he looked round at me. I could
MY FIKST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
only show him the passage with a gasp. I dare say he
might have liked to laugh, for it was cruelly funny,
but he did not; he was concerned for the magazine
as well as for me. lie declared that when he first read
the line he had thought I could not have written it so,
and he agreed with me that it would kill the poem if
it came out in that shape. He instantly set about re
pairing the mischief, so far as could be. He found
that the whole edition of that sheet had been printed,
and the air blackened round me again, lighted up here
and there with baleful flashes of the newspaper wit at
my cost, which I provisioned in my misery; I knew
what I should have said of such a thing myself, if it
had been another's. But the publisher at once decided
that the sheet must be reprinted, and I went away
weak as if in the escape from some deadly peril.
Afterwards it appeared that the line had passed the
first proof-reader as I wrote it, but that the final reader
had entered so sympathetically into the realistic inten
tion of my poem as to contribute the modification
which had nearly been my end.
As it fell out, I lived without farther difficulty to
the day and hour of the dinner Lowell made for me ;
arid I really think, looking at myself impersonally,
and remembering the sort of young fellow I was, that
it would have been a great pity if I had not
dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two,
and the table was laid for four people in some 1
upper room at Parker's, which I was never afterwards
able to make sure of. Lowell was already there when I
came, and he presented me, to my inexpressible delight
and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who was there with him.
4 35
LITEEAEY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Holmes was in the most brilliant hour of that wonder
ful second youth which his fame flowered into long after
the world thought he had completed the cycle of his
literary life. He had already received full recogni
tion as a poet of delicate wit, nimble humor, airy imag
ination, and exquisite grace, when the Autocrat papers
advanced his name indefinitely beyond the bounds
which most immortals would have found range enough.
The marvel of his invention was still fresh in the
minds of men, and time had not dulled in any measure
the sense of its novelty. His readers all fondly iden-
ified him with his work; and I fully expected to find
myself in the Autocrat's presence when I met Dr.
Holmes, But the fascination was none the less for
that reason; and the winning smile, the wise and hu
morous glance, the whole genial manner was as impor
tant to me as if I had foreboded something altogether
different. I found him physically of the Napoleonic
height which spiritually overtops the Alps, and I could
look into his face without that unpleasant effort which
giants of inferior mind so often cost the man. of five
feet four.
A little while after, Fields came in, and then our
number and my pleasure were complete.
Nothing else so richly satisfactory, indeed, as the
whole affair could have happened to a like youth at
such a point in his career; and when I sat down with
Doctor Holmes and Mr. Fields, on Lowell's right, I
felt through and through the dramatic perfection of
the event. The kindly Autocrat recognized some such
quality of it in terms which were not the less precious
and gracious for their humorous excess. I have no
reason to think that he had yet read any of my poor
verses, or had me otherwise than wholly on trust from
Lowell; but he leaned over towards his host, and said,
aa
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
with a laughing look at me, "Well, James, this is
something like the apostolic succession ; this is the lay
ing on of hands." I took his sweet and caressing irony
as he meant it; but the charm of it went to my head
long before any drop of wine, together with the charm
of hearing him and Lowell calling each other James
and Wendell, and of finding them still cordially boys
together.
I would gladly have glimmered before those great
lights in the talk that followed, if I could have thought
of anything brilliant to say, but I could not, and so I
let them shine without a ray of reflected splendor from
me. It was such talk as I had, of course, never heard
before, and it is not saying enough to say that I have
never heard such talk since except from these two men.
It was as light and kind as it was deep and true, and it
ranged over a hundred things, with a perpetual sparkle
of Doctor Holmes's wit, and the constant glow of Low
ell's incandescent sense. From time to time Fields camo
in with one of his delightful stories (sketches of char
acter they were, which he sometimes did not mind cari
caturing), or with some criticism of the literary situa
tion from his stand-point of both lover and publisher of
books. I heard fames that I had accepted as proofs of
power treated as factitious, and witnessed a frankness
concerning authorship, far and near, that I had not
dreamed of authors using. When Doctor Holmes under
stood that I wrote for the Saturday Press, which was
running amuck among some Bostonian immortalities of
the day, he seemed willing that I should know they
were not thought so very undying in Boston, and that I
should not take the notion of a Mutual Admiration So
ciety too seriously, or accept the New York Bohemian
view of Boston as true. For the most part the talk did
not address itself to me, but became an exchange of
3?
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
thoughts and fancies between himself and Lowell. They
touched, I remember, on certain matters of technique,
and the doctor confessed that he had a prejudice against
some words that he could not overcome ; for instance, he
said, nothing could induce him to use 'neath for 'be
neath, no exigency of versification or stress of rhyme.
Lowell contended that he would use any word that car
ried his meaning ; and I think he did this to the hurt of
some of his earlier things. He was then probably in
the revolt against too much literature in literature,
which every one is destined sooner or later to share;
there was a certain roughness, very like crudeness,
which he indulged before his thought and phrase mel
lowed to one music in his later work. I tacitly agreed
rather with the doctor, though I did not swerve from
my allegiance to Lowell, and if I had spoken I should
have sided with him: I would have given that or any
other proof of my devotion. Fields casually mentioned
that he thought " The Dandelion " was the most popu
larly liked of Lowell's briefer poems, and I made haste
to say that I thought so too, though I did not really
think anything about it; and then I was sorry, for I
could see that the poet did not like it, quite ; and I felt
that I was duly punished for my dishonesty.
Hawthorne was named among other authors, proba
bly by Fields, whose house had just published his
" Marble Faun," and who had recently come home on
the same steamer with him. Doctor Holmes asked if I
had met Hawthorne yet, and when I confessed that I
had hardly yet even hoped for such a thing, he smiled
his winning smile, and said : " Ah, well ! I don't know
that you will ever feel you have really met him. He is
like a dim room with a little taper of personality burn
ing on the corner of the mantel."
They all spoke of Hawthorne, and with the same
38
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
affection, but the same sense of something mystical and
remote in him; and every word was priceless to me.
But these masters of the craft I was 'prentice to probably
could not have said anything that I should not have
found wise and well, and I am sure now I should have
been the loser if the talk had shunned any of the phases
of human nature which it touched. It is best to find
that all men are of the same make, and that there are
certain universal things which interest them as much
as the supernal things, and amuse them even more.
There was a saying of Lowell's which he was fond of
repeating at the menace of any form of the transcen
dental, and he liked to warn himself and others with
his homely, " Kemember the dinner-bell." What I re
call of the whole effect of a time so happy for me is that
in all that was said, however high, however fine, we
were never out of hearing of the dinner-bell ; and per
haps this is the best effect I can leave with the reader.
It was the first dinner served in courses that I had sat
down to, and I felt that this service gave it a romantic
importance which the older fashion of the West still
wanted. Even at Governor Chase's table in Columbus
the Governor carved ; I knew of the dinner a la Russe,
as it was then called, only from books; and it was a
sort of literary flavor that I tasted in the successive
dishes. When it came to the black coffee, and then to
the petits verres of cognac, with lumps of sugar set fire
to atop, it was something that so far transcended my
home-kept experience that it began to seem altogether
visionary.
Neither Fields nor Doctor Holmes smoked, and I had
to confess that I did not ; but Lowell smoked enough
for all three, and the spark of his cigar began to show
in the waning light before we rose from the table. The
time that never had, nor can ever have, its fellow for
39
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
me, had to come to an end, as all times must, and when
I shook hands with Lowell in parting, he overwhelmed
me by saying that if I thought of going to Concord he
would send me a letter to Hawthorne. I was not to see
Lowell again during my stay in Boston; but Doctor
Holmes asked me to tea for the next evening, and Fields
said I must come to breakfast with him in the morning.
XI
I recall with the affection due to his friendly nature,
and to the kindness afterwards to pass between us for
many years, the whole aspect of the publisher when I
first saw him. His abundant hair, and his full " beard
as broad as ony spade," that flowed from his throat in
Homeric curls, were touched with the first frost. He
had a fine color, and his eyes, as keen as they were kind,
twinkled restlessly above the wholesome russet-red of
his cheeks. His portly frame was clad in those Scotch
tweeds which had not yet displaced the traditional
broadcloth with us in the West, though I had sent to
New York for a rough suit, and so felt myself not quite
unworthy to meet a man fresh from the hands of the
London tailor.
Otherwise I stood as much in awe of him as his jovial
soul would let me ; and if I might I should like to sug
gest to the literary youth of this day some notion of the
importance of his name to the literary youth of my day.
He gave aesthetic character to the house of Ticknor &
Fields, but he was by no means a silent partner on the
economic side. No one can forecast the fortune of a new
book, but he knew as well as any publisher can know
not only wrhether a book was good, but whether the read
er would think so ; and I suppose that his house made
as few bad guesses, along with their good ones, as any
40
house that ever tried the uncertain temper of the public
with its ventures. In the minds of all who loved the
plain brown cloth and tasteful print of its issues he was
more or less intimately associated with their literature ;
and those who were not mistaken in thinking De Quin-
cey one of the delightfulest authors in the world, were
especially grateful to the man who first edited his writ
ings in book form, and proud that this edition was the
effect of American sympathy with them. At that day,
I believed authorship the noblest calling in the world,
and I should still be at a loss to name any nobler. The
great authors I had met were to me the sum of great
ness, and if I could not rank their publisher with them
by virtue of equal achievement, I handsomely brevetted
him worthy of their friendship, and honored him in the
visible measure of it.
In his house beside the Charles, and in the close
neighborhood of Doctor Holmes, I found an odor and
an air of books such as I fancied might belong to the
famous literary houses of London. It is still there, that
friendly home of lettered refinement, and the gracious
spirit which knew how to welcome me, and make the
least of my shyness and strangeness, and the most of
the little else there was in me, illumines it still, though
my host of that rapturous moment has many years been
of" those who are only with us unseen and unheard. ^ I
remember his burlesque pretence that morning of an in
extinguishable grief when I owned that I bad never
eaten blueberry cake before, and how he kept returning
to the pathos of the fact that there should be a region
of the earth where blueberry cake was unknown We
breakfasted in the pretty room whose windows
through leaves and flowers upon the river's coming anc
going tides, and whose walls were covered with the faces
and the autographs of all the contemporary poets and
41
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
novelists. The Fieldses had spent some days with
Tennyson in their reeent English sojourn, and Mrs.
Fields had much to tell of him, how he looked, how ho
smoked, how he read aloud, and how he said, when he
asked her to go with him to the tower of his house,
" Come up and see the sad English sunset!" which had
an instant value to me such as some rich verse of his
might have had. I was very new to it all, how new I
could not very well say, but I flattered myself that I
breathed in that atmosphere as if in the return from
life-long exile. Still I patriotically bragged of the
West a little, and I told them proudly that in Columbus
no book since Uncle Tom's Cabin had sold so well an
The Marble Faun. This made the effect that I wished,
but whether it was true or not, Heaven knows ; I only
know that I heard it from our leading bookseller, and
I made no question of it myself.
After breakfast, Fields went away to the office, and
I lingered, while Mrs. Fields showed mo from shelf to
shelf in the library, and dazzled me with the sight of
authors' copies, and volumes invaluable with the auto
graphs and the pencilled notes of the men whose names
were dear to me from my love of their work. Every
where was some souvenir of the living celebrities my
hosts had met; and whom had they not met in that
English sojourn in days before England embittered her
self to us during our civil war? Not Tennyson only,
but Thackeray, but Dickens, but Charles Reade, but
Carlyle, but many a minor fame was in my ears from
converse so recent with them that it was as if I heard
their voices in their echoed words.
I cjo not remember how long I stayed ; I remember I
was afraid of staying too long, and so I am sure I did
not stay as long as I should have liked. But I have
not the least notion how I got away, and I am not cer-
42
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
tain where I spent the rest of a day that began in the
clouds, but had to be ended on the common earth. I
suppose I gave it mostly to wandering about the city,
and partly to recording my impressions of it for that
newspaper which never published them. The summer
weather in Boston, with its sunny heat struck through
and through with the coolness of the sea, and its clear
air untainted with a breath of smoke, I have always
loved, but it had then a zest unknown before; and I
should have thought it enough simply to be alive in it.
But everywhere I came upon something that fed my
famine for the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and how
ever the day passed it was a banquet, a festival. I can
only recall my breathless first sight of the Public Li
brary and of the Athenaeum Gallery : great sights then,
which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards
eclipsed for mere emotion. In fact I did not see these
elder treasuries of literature and art between break
fasting with the Autocrat's publisher in the morning,
and taking tea with the Autocrat himself in the evening,
and that made a whole world's difference.
XII
The tea of that simpler time is wholly inconceivable
to this generation, which knows the thing only as a
mild form of afternoon reception ; but I suppose that
in 1860 very few dined late in our whole pastoral re
public. Tea was the meal people asked people to when
they wished to sit at long leisure and large ease ; it came
at the end of the day, at six o'clock, or seven ; and one
went to it in morning dress. It had an unceremonied
domesticity in the abundance of its light dishes, and .
fancy these did not vary much from East to West, except
43
LITEKAKY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
that we had a Southern touch in our fried chicken and
corn bread ; but at the Autocrat's tea table the cheering
cup had a flavor unknown to me before that day. He
asked me if I knew it, and I said it was English break
fast tea; for I had drunk it at the publisher's in the
morning, and was willing not to seem strange to it.
" Ah, yes," he said; " but this is the flower of the sou
chong; it is the blossom, the poetry of tea," and then
he told me how it had been given him by a friend, a
merchant in the China trade, which used to flourish in
Boston, and was the poetry of commerce, as this deli
cate beverage was of tea. That commerce is long past,
and I fancy that the plant ceased to bloom when the
traffic fell into decay.
The Autocrat's windows had the same outlook upon
the Charles as the publisher's, and after tea we went up
into a back parlor of the same orientation, and saw the
sunset die over the water, and the westering flats and
hills. Nowhere else in the world has the day a lovelier
close, and our talk took something of the mystic color
ing that the heavens gave those mantling expanses. It
was chiefly his talk, but I have always found the best
talkers are willing that you should talk if you like,
and a quick sympathy and a subtle sense met all that I
had to say from him and from the unbroken circle of
kindred intelligences about him. I saw him then in
the midst of his family, and perhaps never afterwards
to better advantage, or in a finer mood. We spoke of
the things that people perhaps once liked to deal with
more than they do now; of the intimations of immor
tality, of the experiences of morbid youth, and of all
those messages from the tremulous nerves which wo
take for prophecies. I was not ashamed, before his
tolerant wisdom, to acknowledge the effects that had
lingered so long with me in fancy and even in conduct,
MY F1EST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
from a time of broken health and troubled spirit; and
I remember the exquisite tact in him which recognized
them as things common to all, however peculiar in each,
which left them mine for whatever obscure vanity I
might have in them, and yet gave me the companionship
of the whole race in their experience. We spoke of fore
bodings and presentiments; we approached the mystic
confines of the world from which no traveller has yet
returned with a passport en regie and properly vise;
and he held his light course through these filmy impal
pabilities with a charming sincerity, with the scientific
conscience that refuses either to deny the substance of
things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk,
so weird did my fortune of being there and listening
to him seem, that I might well have been a blessed ghost,
for all the reality I felt in myself.
I tried to tell him how much I had read him from my
boyhood, and with what joy and gain; and he was pa
tient of these futilities, and I have no doubt imagined
the love that inspired them, and accepted that instead of
the poor praise. When the sunset passed, and the lamps
were lighted, and we all came back to our dear littl
firm-set earth, he began to question me about my native
re-ion of it. From many forgotten inquiries I recall
his asking me what was the fashionable religion in
Columbus, or the Church that socially corresponded to
the Unitarian Church in Boston. He had first to clarify
my intelligence as to what Unitarianism was; we had
Universalists but not Unitarians; but when I under
stood, I answered from such vantage as my own wh
futside Swedenborgianism gave me, that I thought ^
of the most respectable people with us were of 1
byterian Church; some were certainly ^g^
but upon the whole the largest number were Prcs
terians. He found that very strange indeed; and said
45
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
that he did not believe there was a Presbyterian Church
in Boston ; that the New England Calvinists were all of
the Orthodox Church. He had to explain Oxthodoxy
to me, and then I could confess to one Congregational
Church in Columbus.
Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear
image of our social frame in the West, but the fault was
altogether mine, if I did. Such lecturing tours as he
had made had not taken him among us, as those of
Emerson and other New-Englanders had, and my report
was positive rather than comparative. I was full of
pride in journalism at that day, and I dare say that I
vaunted the brilliancy and power of our newspapers
more than they merited ; I should not have been likely
to wrong them otherwise. It is strange that in all the
talk I had with him and Lowell, or rather heard from
them, I can recall nothing said of political affairs,
though Lincoln had then been nominated by the Repub
licans, and the Civil War had practically begun. But
we did not imagine such a thing in the North ; we rested
secure in the belief that if Lincoln were elected the
South would eat all its fiery words, perhaps from the
mere love and inveterate habit of fire-eating.
I rent myself away from the Autocrat's presence as
early as I could, and as my evening had been too full of
happiness to sleep upon at once, I spent the rest of the
night till two in the morning wandering about the
streets and in the Common with a Harvard Senior whom
I had met. He was a youth of like literary passions
with myself, but of such different traditions in every
possible way that his deeply schooled and definitely reg
ulated life seemed as anomalous to me as my own des
ultory and self-found way must have seemed to him.
We passed the time in the delight of trying to make
ourselves known to each other, and in a promise to con-
46
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
tinue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent
patience with the necessarily insoluble problem.
XIII
I must have lingered in Boston for the introduction
to Hawthorne which Lowell had offered me, for when
it came, with a little note of kindness and counsel for
myself such as only Lowell had the gift of writing,
it was already so near Sunday that I stayed over till
Monday before I started. I do not recall what I did
with the time, except keep myself from making it a
burden to the people I knew, and wandering about the
city alone. Nothing of it remains to me except the
fortune that favored me that Sunday night with a
view of the old Granary Burying-ground on Tremont
Street. I found the gates open, and I explored every
path in the place, wreaking myself in such meagre
emotion as I could get from the tomb of the Franklin
family, and rejoicing with the whole soul of my West
ern modernity in the evidence of a remote antiquity
which so many of the dim inscriptions afforded. I do
not think that I have ever known anything practically
older than these monuments, though I have since
supped so full of classic and mediaeval ruin. I am sure
that I was more deeply touched by the epitaph of a
poor little 'Puritan maiden who died at sixteen in the
early sixteen-thirties than afterwards by the tomb of
Csecilia Metella, and that the heartache which I tried
to put into verse when I got back to my room m t
hotel was none the less genuine because it would not
lend itself to my literary purpose, and remains not
but pathos to this day.
I am not able to say how I reached the town c
Lowell, where I went before going to Concord, that
47
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
I might ease the unhappy conscience I had about those
factories which I hated so much to see, and have it
clean for the pleasure of meeting the fabricator of
visions Avhom I was authorized to molest in any air-
castle where I might find him. I only know that I
went to Lowell, and visited one of the great mills,
which with their whirring spools, the ceaseless flight
of their shuttles, and the bewildering sight and sound
of all their mechanism have since seemed to me the
death of the joy that ought to come from work, if not
the captivity of those who tended them. But then
I thought it right and well for me to be standing by,
" With sick and scornful looks averse,"
while these others t6iled; I did not see the tragedy
in it, and I got my pitiful literary antipathy away as
soon as I could, no wiser for the sight of the ingenious
contrivances I inspected, and I am sorry to say no sad
der. In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my
hotel, and watched the long files of the work-worn fac
tory-girls stream by, with no concern for them but to
see which was pretty and which was plain, and with no
dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten
hours' work a day in those hideous mills and lodged
them in the barracks where they rested from their toil.
XIV
I wonder if there is a stage that still runs between
Lowrell and Concord, past meadow walls, and under
the caressing boughs of way-side elms, and through
the bird-haunted gloom of woodland roads, in the
freshness of the summer morning? By a blessed
chance I found that there was such a stage in 1860,
and I took it from my hotel, instead of going back to
48
MY FIKST VISIT TO N^W ENGLAND
Boston and up to Concord as I must have had to do by
train. The journey gave me the intimacy of the New
England country as I could have had it in no other
fashion, and for the first time I saw it in all the sum
mer sweetness which I have often steeped my soul in
since. The meadows were newly mown, and the air
was fragrant with the grass, stretching in long win-
rows among the brown bowlders, or capped with can
vas in the little haycocks it had been gathered into the
day before. I was fresh from the affluent farms of
the Western Keserve, and this care of the grass touched
me with a rude pity, which I also bestowed on the
meagre fields of corn and wheat ; but still the land was
lovelier than any I had ever seen, with its old farm
houses, and brambled gray stone walls, its stony hill
sides, its staggering orchards, its wooded tops, and its
thick-brackened valleys. From West to East the dif
ference was as great as I afterwards found it from
America to Europe, and my impression of something
quaint and strange was no keener when I saw Old Eng
land the next year than when I saw New England
now. I had imagined the landscape bare of trees, and
I was astonished to find it almost as full of them as at
home, though they all looked very little, as they well
might to eyes used to the primeval forests of Ohio.
The road ran through them from time to time, and
took their coolness on its smooth hard reaches, and
then issued again in the glisten of the open fields.
I made phrases to myself about the scenery as we
drove along ; and yes, I suppose I made phrases about
the young girl who was one of the inside passengers,
and who, when the common strangeness had somewhat
worn off, began to sing, and sang most of the way t
Concord. Perhaps she was not very sage, and
sure she was not of the caste of Vere de Vere, but she
4ft
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
was pretty enough, and she had a voice of a birdlike
tunableness, so that I would not have her out of the
memory of that pleasant journey if I could. She was
long ago an elderly woman, if she lives, and I suppose
she would not now point out her fellow-passenger if
he strolled in the evening by the house where she had
dismounted, upon her arrival in Concord, and laugh
and pull another girl away from the window, in the
high excitement of the prodigious adventure.
XV
Her fellow-passenger was in far other excitement;
he was to see Hawthorne, and in a manner to meet Pris-
cilla and Zenobia, and Hester Prynne and little Pearl,
and Miriam and Hilda, and Hollingsworth and Cover-
dale, and Chilling-worth and Dimmesdale, and Dona-
tello and Kenyon ; and he had no heart for any such
poor little reality as that, who could not have been
got into any story that one could respect, and must
have been difficult even in a Heinesque poem.
I wasted that whole evening and the next morning
in fond delaying, and it was not until after the indif
ferent dinner I got at the tavern where I stopped, that
I found courage to go and present Lowell's letter to
Hawthorne. I would almost have foregone meeting
the "VYfiJT^ gp-T"na only to have kept that letter, for it
said certain infinitely precious things of me with such
a sweetness, such a grace, as Lowell alone could give
his praise. Years afterwards, when Hawthorne was
dead, I met Mrs. Hawthorne, and told her of the pang
I had in parting with it, and she sent it me, doubly en
riched by Hawthorne's keeping. But now if I were
to see him at all I must give up my letter, and I carried
it in my hand to the door of the cottage he called The
50
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
Wayside. It was never otherwise than a very modest
place, but the modesty was greater then than to-day,
and there was already some preliminary carpentry at
one end of the cottage, which I saw was to result in an
addition to it. I recall pleasant fields across the road
before it; behind rose a hill wooded with low pines,
such as is made in Septimius Felton the scene of the
involuntary duel between Septimius and the young
British officer. I have a sense of the woods corning
quite down to the house, but if this was so I do not
know what to do with a grassy slope which seems to
have stretched part way up the hill. As I approached,
I looked for the tower which the author was fabled to
climb into at sight of the coming guest, and pull the
ladder up after him; and I wondered whether he
would fly before me in that sort, or imagine some easier
means of escaping me.
The door was opened to my ring by a tall handsome
boy whom I suppose to have been Mr. Julian ^Haw
thorne; and the next moment I found myself in the
presence of the romancer, who entered from some
' room beyond. He advanced carrying his head with a
heavy forward droop, and with a pace for which I de
cided that the word would be pondering. It was
the pace of a bulky man of fifty, and his head was that
beautiful head we all know from the many pictures
of it But Hawthorne's look was different from t
of any picture of him that I have seen. It was sombre
and brooding, as the look of such a poet should have
been ; it was the look of a man who had deat faithfully
and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of v 1
which forever attracted, forever evaded Hawthon^
It was by no means troubled; it was full of
r pose Others who knew him better and saw him
oftener were familiar with other aspects, and I remem-
s 51
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
ber that one night at Longfellow's table, when one
of the guests happened to speak of the photograph of
Hawthorne which hung in a corner of the room, Lowell
said, after a glance at it, " Yes, it's good ; but it hasn't
his fine accipitral look."
In the face that confronted me, however, there was
nothing of keen alertness; but only a sort of quiet,
patient intelligence, for which I seek the right word in
vain. It was a very regular face, with beautiful eyes ;
the mustache, still entirely dark, was dense over the
fine mouth. Hawthorne was dressed in black, and he
had a certain effect which I remember, of seeming to
have on a black cravat with no visible collar. He
was such a man that if I had ignorantly met him any
where I should have instantly felt him to be a per
sonage.
I must have given him the letter myself, for I have
no recollection of parting with it before, but I only
remember his offering me his hand, and making me
shyly and tentatively welcome. After a few moments
of the demoralization which followed his hospitable
attempts in me, he asked if I would not like to go up
on his hill with him and sit there, where he smoked in
the afternoon. He offered me a cigar, and when I
said that I did not smoke, he lighted it for himself,
and we climbed the hill together. At the top, where
there was an outlook in the pines over the Concord
meadows, we found a log, and he invited me to a place
on it beside him, and at intervals of a minute or so he
talked while he smoked. Heaven preserved me from
the folly of trying to tell him how much his books had
been to me, and though we got on rapidly at no time,
I think we got on better for this interposition. He
asked me about Lowell, I dare say, for I told him of
my joy in meeting him and Doctor Holmes, and this
52
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
seemed greatly to interest him. Perhaps because
he was so lately from Europe, where our great men
are always seen through the wrong end of the tele
scope, he appeared surprised at my devotion, and ask
ed me whether I cared as much for meeting them as
I should care for meeting the famous English authors.
I professed that I cared much more, though whether
this was true, I now have my doubts, and I think Haw
thorne doubted it at the time. But he said nothing
in comment, and went on to speak generally of Europe
and America. He was curious about the West, which
he seemed to fancy much more purely American, and
said he would like to see some part of the country on
wyhich the shadow (or, if I must be precise, the damned
shadow) of Europe had not fallen. I told him I
thought the West must finally be characterized by the
Germans, whom we had in great numbers, and, purely
from my zeal for German poetry, I tried to allege some
proofs of their present influence, though I could think
of none outside of politics, which I thought they affect
ed wholesomely. I knew Hawthorne was a Demo
crat, and I felt it well to touch politics lightly, but
he had no more to say about the fateful election then
pending than Holmes or Lowell had.
With the abrupt transition of his talk throughout,
he began somehow to speak of women, and said he
had never seen a woman whom he thought quite beau
tiful In the same way he spoke of the New England
temperament, and suggested that the apparent coldnes
in it was also real, and that the suppression of ,
for generations would extinguish it at last,
questioned me as to my knowledge of Concord, anc
whether I had seen any of the notable people,
swered that I had met no one but himself as
I very much wished to see Emerson and
53
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
did not think it needful to say that I wished to see
Thoreau quite as much because he had suffered in the
cause of John Brown as because he had written the
books which had taken me ; and when he said that
Thereau prided himself on coming nearer the heart
of a pine-tree than any other human being, I could say
honestly enough that I would rather come near the
heart of a man. This visibly pleased him, and I saw
that it did not displease him, when he asked whether I
was not going to see his next neighbor, Mr. Alcott,
and I confessed that I had never heard of him. That
surprised as well as pleased him; he remarked, with
whatever intention, that there was nothing like recog
nition to make a man modest ; and he entered into some
account of the philosopher, whom I suppose I need not
be much ashamed of not knowing then, since his in
fluence was of the immediate sort that makes a man
important to his townsmen while he is still strange
to his countrymen.
Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape,
and said certain of the pleasant fields below us be
longed to him ; but he preferred his hill-top, and if he
could have his way those arable fields should be grown
up to pines too. He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and
in the hour that we spent together, his whiffs were of
the desultory and unfinal character of his words.
When we went down, he asked me into his house again,
and would have me stay to tea, for which we found
the table laid. But there was a great deal of silence in
it all, and at times, in spite of his shadowy kindness, I
felt my spirits sink. After tea, he showed me a book
case, where there were a few books toppling about on
the half-filled shelves, and said, coldly, " This is my
library." I knew that men were his books, and though
I myself cared for books so much, I found it fit and
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
fine that he should care so little, or seem to care so lit
tle. Some of his own romances were among the volumes
on ^ these shelves, and when I put my finger on the
Blithedale Romance and said that I preferred that
to the others, his face lighted up, and he said that he
believed the Germans liked that best too.
Upon the whole we parted such good friends that
when I offered to take leave he asked me how long I
was to be in Concord, and not only bade me come to see
him again, but said he would give me a card to Emer
son, if I liked. I answered, of course, that I should
like it beyond all things ; and he wrote on the back of
his card something which I found, when I got away, to
be, "I find this young man worthy." The quaintness,
the little stiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was
amusing to one who was not without his sense of humor,
but the kindness filled me to the throat with joy. In
fact, I entirely liked Hawthorne. He had been as cor
dial as so shy a man could show himself; and I per
ceived, with the repose that nothing else can give, the
entire sincerity of his soul.
Nothing could have been further from the behavior of
this very great man than any sort of posing, apparently,
or a wish to affect me with a sense of his greatness. I
saw that he was as much abashed by our encounter as
I was ; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort,
but in no ignoble sense was he conscious, and as nearly
as he could with one so much his younger he made an
absolute equality between us. My memory of him is
without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life,
my heart I paid him the same glad homage that I paid
Lowell and Holmes, and he did nothing to make me
think that I had overpaid him. This seems perhaps
very little to say in his praise, but to my mind it is i
ing everything,' for I have known but few great en,
55
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
especially of those I met in early life, when I wished
to lavish my admiration upon them, whom I have not
the impression of having left in my debt. Then, a de
fect of the Puritan quality, which I have found in many
ISTew-Englanders, is that, wittingly or unwittingly, they
propose themselves to you as an example, or if not quite
this, that they surround themselves with a subtle ether
of potential disapprobation, in which, at the first sign
of unworthiness in you, they helplessly suffer you to
gasp and perish ; they have good hearts, and they would
probably come to your succor out of humanity, if they
knew how, but they do not know how. Hawthorne had
nothing of this about him; he was no more tacitly than
he was explicitly didactic. I thought him as thorough
ly in keeping with his romances as Doctor Holmes had
seemed with his essays and poems, and I met him as I
had met the Autocrat in the upreme hour of his fame.
He had just given the world the last of those incom
parable works which it was to have finished from his
hand; the Marble Faun had worthily followed, at a
somewhat longer interval than usual, the Blithedale
Romance., and the House of Seven Gables, and the
Scarlet Letter, and had perhaps carried his name higher
than all the rest, and certainly farther. Everybody
was reading it, and more or less bewailing its indefinite
close, but yielding him that full honor and praise which
a writer can hope for but once in his life. Nobody
dreamed that thereafter only precious fragments,
sketches more or less faltering, though all with the di
vine touch in them, were further to enrich a legacy
which in its kind is the finest the race has received from
any mind. As I have said, we are always finding new
Hawthornes, but the illusion soon wears away, and then
we perceive that they were not Hawthornes at all ; that
he had some peculiar difference from them, which, by-
5G
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
and-by, we shall no doubt consent must be his difference
from all men evermore.
I am painfully aware that I have not summoned be
fore the reader the image of the man as it has always
stood in my memory, and I feel a sort of shame for my
failure. He was so altogether simple that it seems as
if it would be easy to do so ; but perhaps a spirit from
the other world would be simple too, and yet would no
more stand at parle, or consent to be sketched, than
Hawthorne. In fact, he was always more or less merg
ing into the shadow, which was in a few years wholly
to close over him; there was nothing uncanny in his
presence, there was nothing even unwilling, but he had
that apparitional quality of some great minds which
kept Shakespeare largely unknown to those who thought
themselves his intimates, and has at last left him a
sort of doubt. There was nothing teasing or wilfully
elusive in Hawthorne's impalpability, such as I after
wards felt in Thoreau; if he was not there to your
touch, it was no fault of his ; it was because your touch
was dull, arid wanted the use of contact with such nat
ures. The hand passes through the veridical phantom
without a sense of its presence, but the phantom is none
the less veridical for all that.
XVI
I kept the evening of the day I met Hawthorne
wholly for the thoughts of him, or rather for that
reverberation which continues in the young sensibili
ties after some important encounter. It must have
been the next morning that I went to find Thoreau,
and I am dimly aware of making one or two failures
to find him, if I ever really found him at all.
He is an author who has fallen into that abey-
57
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
ance, awaiting all authors, great or small, at some
time or another; but I think that with him, at
least in regard to his most important book, it can be
only transitory. I have not read the story of his her
mitage beside Walden Pond since the year 1858, but I
have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should
think it a wiser and truer conception of the world than
I thought it then. It is no solution of the problem;
men are not going to answer the riddle of the painful
earth by building themselves shanties and living upon
beans and watching ant-fights ; but I do not believe Tol
stoy himself has more clearly shown the hollowness,
the hopelessness, the unworthiness of the life of the
world than Thoreau did in that book. If it were newly
written it could not fail of a far vaster acceptance than
it had then, when to those who thought and felt seri
ously it seemed that if slavery could only be controlled,
all things else would come right of themselves with us.
Slavery has not only been controlled, but it has been
destroyed, and yet things have not begun to come right
with us; but it was in the order of Providence that
chattel slavery should cease before industrial slavery,
and the infinitely crueler and stupider vanity and lux
ury bred of it, should be attacked. If there was then
any prevision of the struggle now at hand, the seers
averted their eyes, and strove only to cope with the less
evil. Thoreau himself, who had so clear a vision of
the falsity and folly of society as we still have it, threw
himself into the tide that was already, in Kansas and
Virginia, reddened with war ; he aided and abetted the
John Brown raid, I do not recall how much or in what
sort ; and he had suffered in prison for his opinions and
actions. It was this inevitable heroism of his that, more
than his literature even, made me wish to see him and
revere him; and I do not believe that I should have
58
found the veneration difficult, when at last I met him in
his insufficient person, if he had otherwise been present
to my glowing expectation. He came into the room a
quaint, stump figure of a man, whose effect of long
trunk and short limbs was heightened by his fashionlesd
trousers being let down too low. He had a noble face,
with tossed hair, a distraught eye, and a fine aquilinity
of profile, which made me think at once of Don Quixote
and of Cervantes ; but his nose failed to add that foot
to his stature which Lamb says a nose of that shape will
always give a man. He tried to place me geographical
ly after he had given me a chair not quite so far off as
Ohio, though still across the whole room, for he sat
against one wall, and I against the other ; but apparent
ly he failed to pull himself out of his revery by the
effort, for he remained in a dreamy muse, which all niy
attempts to say something fit about John Brown and
Walden Pond seemed only to deepen upon him. I have
not the least doubt that I was needless and valueless
about both, and that what I said could not well have
prompted an important response; but I did my poor
best, and I was terribly disappointed in the result.
truth is that in those days I was a helplessly concrete
young person, and all forms of the abstract, the
drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts. I do not
remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or of bin
self at all, and when he began to speak of John Brown,
it was not the warm, palpable, loving, fearful old man
of my conception, but a sort of John Brown type, a
John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle, which v
ere somehow (with long pauses between the -
•phic phrases) to cherish, and to nourish c
were
or
1 1 was not merely a defeat of my Hopes, it was a rout,
and I felt m^e If I scattered over the field of thoaght
59
LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
that I could hardly bring my forces together for retreat.
I must have made some effort, vain and foolish enough,
to rematerialize my old demigod, but when I
came away it Avas with the feeling that there was
very little more left of John Brown than there was
of me. His body was not mouldering in the grave,
neither was his soul marching on ; his ideal, his type,
his principle alone existed, and I did not know what to
do with it. I am not blaming Thoreau ; his words were
addressed to a far other understanding than mine, and
it was my misfortune if I could not profit by them. I
think, or I venture to hope, that I could profit better
by them now; but in this record I am trying honestly
to report their effect with the sort of youth I was then.
XVII
Such as I was, I rather wonder that I had the
courage, after this experiment of Thoreau, to pre
sent the card Hawthorne had given me to Emerson.
I must have gone to him. at once, however, for I
cannot make out any interval of time between my
visit to the disciple and my visit to the master. I
think it was Emerson himself who opened his door to
me, for I have a vision of the fine old man standing
tall on his threshold, with the card in his hand, and
looking from it to me with a vague serenity, while I
waited a moment on the door-step below him. He
must then have been about sixty, but I remember
nothing of age in his aspect, though I have called him
an old man. His hair, I am sure, was still entirely
dark, and his face had a kind of marble youthfulness,
chiselled to a delicate intelligence by the highest and
noblest thinking that any man has done. There was a
strange charm in Emerson's eyes, which I felt then and
60
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
always, something like that I saw in Lincoln's, but
shyer, but sweeter and less sad. His smile was the very
sweetest I have ever beheld, and the contour of the
mask and the line of the profile were in keeping with
this incomparable sweetness of the mouth, at once grave
and quaint, though quaint is not quite the word for it
either, but subtly, not unkindly arch, which again is
not the word.
It was his great fortune to have been mostly misun
derstood, and to have reached the dense intel licence of
' O
his fellow-men after a whole lifetime of perfectly simple
and lucid appeal, and his countenance expressed the
patience and forbearance of a wise man content to bide
his time. It would be hard to persuade people now
that Emerson once represented to the popular mind all
that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a cer
tain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incom
prehensible, the byword of the poor paragraphcr. He
had perhaps disabused the community somewhat by
presenting himself here and there as a lecturer, and
talking face to face with men in terms which they could
not refuse to find as clear as they were wise; he was
more and more read, by certain persons, here and there;
but we are still so far behind him in the reach of his
far-thinking that it need not be matter of wonder that
twenty years before his death he was the most misun
derstood man in America. Yet in that twilight where
he dwelt he loomed large upon the imagination; the
minds that could not conceive him were still aware of
his greatness. I myself had not read much of him, but
I knew the essays he was printing in the Atlantic, and
I knew certain of his poems, though by no means many :
yet I had this sense of him, that he was somehow, be
yond and above my ken, a presence of force and beauty
and wisdom, uncompanioncd in our literature. He had
61
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
lately stooped from his ethereal heights to take part in
the battle of humanity, and I suppose that if the truth
were told he was more to my young fervor because he
had said that John Brown had made the gallows glori
ous like the cross, than because he had uttered all those
truer and wiser things which will still a hundred years
hence be leading the thought of the world.
I do not know in just what sort he made me welcome,
but I am aware of sitting with him in his study or
library, and of his presently speaking of Hawthorne,
whom I probably celebrated as I best could, and whom
he praised for his personal excellence, and for his fine
qualities as a neighbor. " But his last book," he added,
reflectively, " is a mere mush," and I perceived that
this great man was no better equipped to judge an art
istic fiction than the groundlings who were then crying
out upon the indefinite close of the Marble Faun. Ap
parently he had read it, as they had, for the story, but
it seems to me now, if it did not seem to me then, that
as far as the problem of evil was involved, the book
must leave it where it found it. That is forever in
soluble, and it was rather with that than with his more
or less shadowy people that the romancer was con
cerned. Emerson had, in fact, a defective sense as to
specific pieces of literature; he praised extravagantly,
and in the wrong place, especially among the new
things, and he failed to see the worth of much that was
fine and precious beside the line of his fancy.
He began to ask me about the West, and about some
unknown man in Michigan, who had been sending him
poems, and whom he seemed to think very promising,
though he has not apparently kept his word to do great
tilings. I did not find what Emerson had to say of my
section very accurate or important, though it was kindly
enough, and just enough as to what the West ought to
62
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
do in literature. He thought it a pity that a literary
periodical which had lately been started in Cincinnati
should be appealing to the East for contributions, in
stead of relying upon the writers nearer home ; and he
listened with what patience he could to my modest opin
ion that we had not the writers nearer home. I never
was of those Westerners who believed that the West was
kept out of literature by the jealousy of the East, and I
tried to explain why we had not the men to write that
magazine full in Ohio. He alleged the man in Michigan
as one who alone could do much to fill it worthily, and
again I had to say that I had never heard of him.
I felt rather guilty in my ignorance, and I had a no
tion that it did not commend me, but happily at this
moment Mr. Emerson was called to dinner, and he
asked me to come with him. After dinner we walked
about in his " pleached garden " a little, and then we
came again into his library, where I meant to linger
only till I could fitly get away. He questioned me
about what I had seen of Concord, and whom besides
Hawthorne I had met, and when I told him only
Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems of Mr.
William Ellery Channing. I have known them since,
and felt their quality, which I have gladly owned a
genuine and original poetry ; but I answered then truly
that I knew them only from Poe's criticisms : cruel and
spiteful things which I should be ashamed of enjoying
as I once did.
" Whose criticisms ?" asked Emerson.
" Poe's," I said again.
" Oh," he cried out, after a moment, as if he had
returned from a far search for my meaning, " you mean
the jingle-man!"
I do not know why this should have put me to such
confusion, but if I had written the criticisms myself I
63
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
do not think I could have been more abashed. Perhaps
I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in a character
ization of Poe which the world will hardly agree with ;
though I do not agree with the world about him, my
self, in its admiration. At any rate, it made an end of
me for the time, and I remained as if already absent,
while Emerson questioned me as to what I had written
in the Atlantic Monthly. He had evidently read none
of my contributions, for he looked at them, in the bound
volume of the magazine which he got down, with the
effect of being wholly strange to them, and then gravely
affixed my initials to each. He followed me to the door,
still speaking of poetry, and as he took a kindly enough
leave of me, he said one might very well give a pleas
ant hour to it now and then.
A pleasant hour to poetry! I was meaning to give
all time and all eternity to poetry, and I should by no
means have wished to find pleasure in it ; I should have
thought that a proof of inferior quality in the work; I
should have preferred anxiety, anguish even, to
pleasure. But if Emerson thought from the glance he
gave my verses that I had better not lavish myself upon
that kind of thing, unless there was a great deal more of
me than I could have made apparent in our meeting,
no doubt he was right. I was only too painfully aware
of my shortcoming, but I felt that it was shorter-coming
than it need have been. I had somehow not prospered
in my visit to Emerson as I had with Hawthorne, and
I came away wondering in what sort I had gone wrong.
I was not a forth-putting youth, and I could not blame
myself for anything in my approaches that merited
withholding; indeed, I made no approaches; but as I
must needs blame myself for something, I fell upon the
fact that in my confused retreat from Emerson's pres
ence I had failed in a certain slight point of ceremony,
64
MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND
and I magnified this into an offence of capital im
portance. I went home to my hotel, and passed the
afternoon in pure misery. I had moments of wild
question when I debated whether it would be better to
go back and own my error, or whether it would be better
to write him a note, and try to set myself right in that
way. But in the end I did neither, and I have since
survived my mortal shame some forty years or
more. But at the time it did not seem possible that I
should live through the day with it, and I thought that
I ought at least to go and confess it to Hawthorne, and
let him disown the wretch who had so poorly repaid
the kindness of his introduction by such misbehavior.
I did indeed walk down by the Wayside, in the cool of
the evening, and there I saw Hawthorne for the last
time. He was sitting on one of the timbers beside his
cottage, and smoking with an air of friendly calm. I
had got on very well with him, and I longed to go in,
and tell him how ill I had got on with Emerson ; I be
lieved that though he cast me off, he would understand
me, and would perhaps see some hope for me in another
world, though there could be none in this.
But I had not the courage to speak of the affair to
any one but Fields, to whom I unpacked my heart when
I got back to Boston, and he asked me about my^ ad
ventures in Concord. By this time I could see it in a
humorous light, and I did not much mind his lying
back in his chair and laughing and laughing, till I
thought he would roll out of it, He perfectly con
ceived the situation, and got an amusement from it that
I could get only through sympathy with him.
thought it a favorable moment to propose myself as the
assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, which I had
the belief I could very well become, with advanta
myself if not to the magazine. He seemed to think so
65
too; he said that if the place had not just been filled,
I should certainly have had it ; and it was to his recol
lection of this prompt ambition of mine that I suppose
I may have owed my succession to a like vacancy some
four years later. He was charmingly kind; he entered
with the sweetest interest into the story of my economic
life, which had been full of changes and chances al
ready. But when I said very seriously that now I was
tired of these fortuities, and would like to be settled in
something, he asked, with dancing eyes,
" Why, how old are you ?"
" I am twenty-three," I answered, and then the laugh
ing fit took him again.
" Well," he said, " you begin young, out there !"
In my heart I did not think that twenty-three was so
very young, but perhaps it was; and if any one were
to say that I had been portraying here a youth whose
aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who was
morbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably
conscious, who had met with incredible kindness, and
had suffered no more than was good for him, though he
might not have merited his pain any more than his joy.
I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not
at all sure that I was not just that kind of youth when
I paid my first visit to New England.
part SeconO
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
IT was by boat that I arrived from Boston, on an
August morning of 1860, which was probably of
the same quality as an August morning of 1900. I
used not to mind the weather much in those days; it
was hot or it was cold, it was wet or it was dry, but it
was not my affair; and I suppose that I sweltered
about the strange city, with no sense of anything very
personal in the temperature, until nightfall. What
I remember is being high up in a hotel long since laid
low, listening in the summer dark, after the long day
was done, to the Niagara roar of the omnibuses whose
tide then swept Broadway from curb to curb, for all
the miles of its length. At that hour the other city
noises were stilled, or lost in this vaster volume of
sound, which seemed to fill the whole night. It Jiad
a solemnity which the modern comer to New York
will hardly imagine, for that tide of omnibuses has long
since ebbed away, and has left the air to the strident
discords of the elevated trains and the irregular
alarum of the grip-car gongs, which blend to no such
harmonious thunder as rose from the procession (
those ponderous and innumerable vans. There wa
a sort of inner quiet in the sound, and when I ch<
I slept off to it, and woke to it in the morning refreshed
and strengthened to explore the literary situatii
the metropolis.
6 67
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
ISTot that I think I left this to the second day. Very
probably I lost no time in going to the office of the
Saturday Press, as soon as I had my breakfast after
arriving, and I have a dim impression of anticipating
the earliest of the Bohemians, whose gay theory of
life obliged them to a good many hardships in lying
down early in the morning, and rising up late in the
day. If it was the office-boy who bore me company
during the first hour of my visit, by-and-by the editors
and contributors actually began to come in. I would
not be very specific about them if I could, for since
that Bohemia has faded from the map of the republic
of letters, it has grown more and more difficult to trace
its citizenship to any certain writer. There are some
living who knew the Bohemians and even loved them,
but there are increasingly few who were of them, even
in the fond retrospect of youthful follies and errors.
It was in fact but a sickly colony, transplanted from
the mother asphalt of Paris, and never really striking
root in the pavements of ISTew York; it was a colony
of ideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any
deep root anywhere. What these ideas, these theories,
were in art and in life, it would not be very easy to
say; but in the Saturday Press they came to violent
expression, not to say explosion, against all existing
forms of respectability. If respectability was your
'bete noire, then you were a Bohemian ; and if you were
in the habit of rendering yourself in prose, then you
necessarily shredded your prose into very fine para
graphs of a sentence each, or of a very few words, or
even of one word. I believe this fashion prevailed
till very lately with some of the dramatic critics, who
68
MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style;
and I suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic
moments of Victor Hugo hy the editor of the Press.
He brought it back with him when he came home from
one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the
French accent rather than the French language ; I long
desired to write in that fashion myself, but I had not
the courage.
This editor was a man of such open and avowed
cynicism that he may have been, for all I know, a kind
ly optimist at heart; some say, however, that he had
really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only
know that his talk, the first day I saw him, was of such
a sort that if he was half as bad, he would have
been too bad to be. He walked up and down his room
saying what lurid things he would directly do if any
one accused him of respectability, so that he might dis
abuse the minds of all witnesses. There were four or
five of his assistants and contributors listening to the
dreadful threats, which did not deceive even so great
innocence as mine, but I do not know whether they
found it the sorry farce that I did. They probably
felt the fascination for him which I could not disown,
in spite of my inner disgust; and were watchful at
the same time for the effect of his words with one who
was confessedly fresh from Boston, and was full
delight in the people he had seen there. It appeared
with him, to be proof of the inferiority of Boston that
if you passed down Washington Street, half a dozen
men in the crowd would know you -ere Holmes c
Lowell, or Longfellow, or Wendell Phillips; but m
Broadway no one would know who you were or care
fhe measure of his smallest blasphemy. I have since
heard L more than once urged as a signal advantage
of New York for the aesthetic inhabitant, but I am not
69
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
sure, yet, that it is so. The unrecognized celebrity
probably has his mind quite as much upon himself
as if some one pointed him out, and otherwise I can
not think that the sense of neighborhood is such a
bad thing for the artist in any sort. It involves the
sense of responsibility, which cannot be too constant
or too keen. If it narrows, it deepens; and this may
be the secret of Boston.
II
It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian
group represented New York literature to my imagi
nation, for I certainly associated other names with its
best work, but perhaps it was because I had written
for the Saturday Press myself, and had my pride in
it, and perhaps it was because that paper really em
bodied the new literary life of the city. It was clever,
and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything.
It attacked all literary shams but its own, and it made
itself felt and feared. The young writers throughout
the country were ambitious to be seen in it, and they
gave their best to it ; they gave literally, for the Satur
day Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying,
vaguer even than promises. It is not too much to say
that it was very nearly as well for one to be accepted
by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic, and for
the time there was no other literary comparison. To
be in it was to be in the company of Fitz James
O'Brien, Eitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Sted-
man, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveli
est in verse at that day in New York. It was a power,
and although it is true that, as Henry Giles said of it,
" Man cannot live by snapping-turtle alone," the Press
was very good snapping-turtle. Or, it seemed so then ;
I should be almost afraid to test it now, for I do not
70
MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITEEAEY NEW YORK
like snapping-turtle so much as I once did, and I have
grown nicer in my taste, and want my snapping-turtle
of the very best. What is certain is that I went to
the office of the Saturday Press in New York with
much the same sort of feeling I had in going to the
office of the Atlantic Monthly in Boston, but I came
away with a very different feeling. I had found there
a bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness
against respectability, and as Boston was then rapidly
becoming my second country, I could not join in the
scorn thought of her and said of her by the Bohemians.
I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the liter
ary pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he
had experienced in visiting other shrines; but I found
no harm in that, for I knew just how much to be shock
ed, and I thought I knew better how to value certain
things of the soul than they. Yet when their chief ask
ed me how I got on with Hawthorne, and I began to
say that he was very shy and I was rather shy, and
the king of Bohemia took his pipe out to break in upon
me with "Oh, a couple of shysters!" and the rest
laughed, I was abashed all they could have wished,
and was not restored to myself till one of them said
that the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin^
then I began to hope again that men who took them-'
selves so seriously as that need not be taken very seri
ously by me.
In fact I had heard things almost as despei
cynical in other newspaper offices before that, and^I
could not see what was so distinctively Bohemian i
these animo prave, these souls so baleful by their own
showing. But apparently Bohemia was not e
that vou could well imagine from one encounter ^
since my stay in New York was to be very short, I lo*
noUme'in acquainting myself further with it. That
71
L1TERAKY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
very night I went to the beer-cellar, once very far
up Broadway, where I was given to know that the Bo
hemian nights were smoked and quaffed away. It was
said, so far West as Ohio, that the queen of Bohemia
sometimes came to Pf aff's : a young girl of a sprightly
gift in letters, whose name or pseudonym had made
itself pretty well known at that day, and whose fate,
pathetic at all times, out-tragedies almost any other in
the history of letters. She was seized with hydrophobia
from the bite of her dog, on a railroad train ; and made
a long journey home in the paroxysms of that agoniz
ing disease, which ended in her death after she reached
New York. But this was after her reign had ended,
and no such black shadow was cast forward upon
Pfaff's, whose name often figured in tKe verse and the
epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the Saturday
Press. I felt that as a contributor and at least a bre
vet Bohemian I ought not to go home without visiting
the famous place, and witnessing if I could not share
the revels of my comrades. As I neither drank beer
nor smoked, my part in the carousal was limited to a
German pancake, which I found they had very good
at Pfaff's, and to listening to the whirling words of
my commensals, at the long board spread for the Bo
hemians in a cavernous space under the pavement.
There were writers for the Saturday Press and for
Vanity Fair (a hopefully comic paper of that day),
and some of the artists who drew for the illustrated
periodicals. Nothing of their talk remains with me,
but the impression remains that it was not so good talk
as I had heard in Boston. At one moment of the orgy,
which went but slowly for an orgy, we were joined by
some belated Bohemians whom the others made a great
clamor over ; I was given to understand they were just
recovered from a fearful debauch; their locks were
. 72
MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
still damp from the wet towels used to restore them,
and their eyes were very frenzied. I was presented to
these types, who neither said nor did anything worthy
of their awful appearance, but dropped into seats at
the table, and ate of the supper with an appetite that
seemed poor. I stayed hoping vainly for worse things
till eleven o'clock, and then I rose and took my leave of
a. literary condition that had distinctly disappointed
me. I do not say that it may not have been wickeder
and_wittier than I found it ; I only report what I saw
and heard in Bohemia on my first visit to New York,
and I know that my acquaintance with it was not ex
haustive. When I came the next year the Saturday
Press was no more, and the editor and his contributors
had no longer a common centre. The best of the young
fellows whom I met there confessed, in a pleasant
exchange of letters which we had afterwards, that he
thought the pose a vain and unprofitable one; and
when the Press was revived, after the war, it was with
out any of the old Bohemian characteristics except
that of not paying for material. It could not last long
upon these terms, and again it passed away, and still
waits its second palingenesis.
The editor passed away too, not long after, and the
thing that he had inspired altogether ceased to be. lie
was a man of a certain sardonic power, and used it
rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probably more ap
parent than real in the pain it gave. In my last knowl
edge of him he was much milder than when I first
him, and I have the feeling that he too came to own
before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtl
alone. He was kind to some neglected talents and
befriended them with a vigor and a zeal which he
would have been the last to let you call generous,
chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when 1
73
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Saturday Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause
with the critics on either side of the ocean as any man
could have. It was not till long afterwards that his
English admirers began to discover him, and to make
his countrymen some noisy reproaches for ignoring
him; they were wholly in the dark concerning him
when the Saturday Press, which first stood his friend,
and the young men whom the Press gathered about it,
made him their cult. No doubt he was more valued
because he was so offensive in some ways than he would
have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it
remains a fact that they celebrated him quite as much
as was good for them. He was often at Pfaff's with
them, and the night of my visit he was the chief fact
of my experience. I did not know he was there till I
was on my way out, for he did not sit at the table under
the pavement, but at the head of one farther into the
room. There, as I passed, some friendly fellow stopped
me and named me to him, and I remember how he
leaned back in his chair, and reached out his great hand
to me, as if he were going to give it me for good and
all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair
upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gen
tle eyes that looked most kindly into mine, and seemed
to wish the liking which I instantly gave him, though
we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was
summed up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty
fist upon my hand. I doubt if he had any notion who'
or what I was beyond the fact that I was a young poet
of some sort, but he may possibly have remembered
seeing my name printed after some very Heinesque
verses in the Press. I did not meet him again for
twenty years, and then I had only a moment with him
when he was reading the proofs of his poems in Bos
ton. Some years later I saw him for the last time,
74
MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
one day after his lecture on Lincoln, in that city, when
he came down from the platform to speak with some
hand-shaking friends who gathered about him. Then
and always he gave me the sense of a sweet and true
soul, and I felt in him a spiritual dignity which I will
not try to reconcile with his printing in the forefront
of his book i passage from a private letter of Emer
son's, though I believe he would not have seen such a
thing as most other men would, or thought ill of it in
another. The spiritual purity which I felt in him
no less than the dignity is something that I will no
more try to reconcile with what denies it in his page ;
but such things we may well leave to the adjustment
of finer balances than we have at hand. I will make
sure only of the greatest benignity in the presence of
the man. The apostle of the rough, the uncouth, was
the gentlest person ; his barbaric yawp, translated into
the terms of social encounter, was an address of singu
lar quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endear
ing friendliness.
As to his work itself, I suppose that I do not think
it so valuable in effect as in intention. He was a lib
erating force, a very « imperial anarch " in literature;
but liberty is never anything but a means, and wh;
Whitman achieved was a means and not an end, m what
must be called his verse. I like his prose, if there
difference, much better; there he is of a genial and
comforting quality, very rich and cordial, such as I
him to be when I met him in person. His verse seems
to me not poetry, but the materials of poetry, 1,
emotions; yet I would not misprize it, and
to own that I have had moments of great pleasure in it
Some French critic quoted in the ^^fj^
cannot think of his name) sald the best thing c
when he said that he made you a partner of the ente
75
LITEKAKY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
prise, for that is precisely what he does, and that is
what alienates and what endears in him, as you like or
dislike the partnership. It is still something neigh
borly, brotherly, fatherly, and so I felt him to be when
the benign old man looked on me and spoke to me.
Ill
That night at PfafPs must have been the last of the
Bohemians for me, and it was the last of New York
authorship too, for the time. I do not know why I
should not have imagined trying to see Curtis, whom I
knew so much by heart, and whom I adored, but I may
not have had the courage, or I may have heard that he
was out of town; Bryant, I believe, was then out of
the country; but at any rate I did not attempt him
either. The Bohemians were the beginning and the
end of the story for me, and to tell the truth I did not
like the story. I remember that as I sat at that table
under the pavement, in Pfaff's beer-cellar, and listened
to the wit that did not seem very funny, I thought of
the dinner with Lowell, the breakfast with Fields, the
supper at the Autocrat's, and felt that I had fallen very
far. In fact it can do no harm at this distance of time
to confess that it seemed to me then, and for a good
while afterwards, that a person who had seen the men
and had the things said before him that I had in Boston,
could not keep himself too carefully in cotton ; and this
was what I did all the following winter, though of
course it was a secret between me and me. I dare say
it was not the worst thing I could have done, in some
respects.
My sojourn in New York could not have been very
long, and the rest of it was mainly given to viewing the
monuments of the city from the windows of omnibuses
70
MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
and the platforms of horse-cars. The world was so
simple then that there were perhaps only a half-dozen
cities that had horse-cars in them, and I travelled in
those conveyances at New York with an unfaded zest,
even after my journeys back and forth between Boston
and Cambridge. I have not the least notion where I
went or what I saw, but I suppose that it was up and
down the ugly east and west avenues, then lying open
to the eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed by
the elevated roads, and that I found them very stately
and handsome. Indeed, Kew York was really hand
somer then than it is now, when it has so many more
pieces of beautiful architecture, for at that day the sky
scrapers were not yet, and there was a fine regularity
in the streets that these brute bulks have robbed of all
shapeliness. Dirt and squalor there were a plenty, but
there was infinitely more comfort. The long succes
sion of cross streets was yet mostly secure from busi
ness, after you passed Clinton Place; commerce was
•just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and
Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies,
whose kin and kind dwelt unmolested in the brown-
stone stretches of Fifth Avenue. I tried hard to imaj
ine them from the acquaintance Mr. Butler's poem had
given me, and from the knowledge the gentle satire (
The Potipliar Papers had spread broadcast through
a community shocked by the excesses of our best
etv; it was not half so bad then as the best now, prob,
blv But I do not think I made very much of it p
haps because most of the people who ought to have I
in those fine mansions were away at the sea-^de an
"mottains I had seen on my way do,, from
Canada but he La-side not, and it would never do to
go home without visiting some famous summer resort.
77
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
I must have fixed upon Long Branch because I must
have heard of it as then the most fashionable ; and one
afternoon I took the boat for that place. By this means
I not only saw sea-bathing for the first time, but I saw
a storm at sea: a squall struck us so suddenly that it
blew away all the camp-stools of the forward prome
nade ; it was very exciting, and I long meant to use in
literature the black wall of cloud that settled on the
water before us like a sort of portable midnight ; I now
throw it away upon the reader, as it were; it never
would come in anywhere. I stayed all night at Long
Branch, and I had a bath the next morning before break
fast : an extremely cold one, with a life-line to keep
me against the undertow. In this rite I had the com
pany of a young !N"ew- Yorker, whom I had met on the
boat coming down, and who was of the light, hopeful,
adventurous business type which seems peculiar to the
city, and which has always attracted me. He told me
much about his life, and how he lived, and what it cost
him to live. He had a large room at a fashionable
boarding-house, and he paid fourteen dollars a week.
In Columbus I had such a room at such a house, and
paid three and a half, and I thought it a good deal. But
those were the days before the war, when America was
the cheapest country in the world, and the West was
incredibly inexpensive.
After a day of lonely splendor at this scene of fashion
and gayety, I went back to New York, and took the boat
for Albany on my way home. I noted that I had no
longer the vivid interest in nature and human nature
which I had felt in setting out upon my travels, and I
said to myself that this was from having a mind so
crowded with experiences and impressions that it could
receive no more ; and I really suppose that if the hap
piest phrase had offered itself to me at some moments, I
78
MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
should scarcely have looked about me for a landscapeora
figure to fit it to. I was very glad to get back to my dear
little city in the West (I found it seething in an August
sun that was hot enough to have calcined the limestone
State House), and to all the friends I was so fond of.
IV
I did what I could to prove myself unworthy of them
by refusing their invitations, and giving myself wholly
to literature, during the early part of the winter that
followed ; and I did not realize my error till the invita
tions ceased to come, and I found myself in an unbroken
intellectual solitude. The worst of it was that an un
grateful Muse did little in return for the sacrifices I
made her, and the things I now wrote were not liked by
the editors I sent them to. The editorial taste is not
always the test of merit, but it is the only one we have,
and I am not saying the editors were wrong in my case.
There were then such a very few places where you could
market your work: the Atlantic in Boston and Harper's
in ISTew York were the magazines that paid, though the
Independent newspaper bought literary material; the
Saturday Press printed it without buying, and so did
the old Knickerbocker Magazine, though there was pe
cuniary good-will in both these cases. I toiled much
that winter over a story I had long been writing, and at
last sent it to the Atlantic, which had published five
poems for me the year before. After some weeks, or it
may have been months, I got it back with a note saying
that the editors had the less regret in returning it be
cause they saw that in the May number of the Knicker
bocker the first chapter of the story had appeared. Then
I remembered that, years before, I had sent this chapter
to that magazine, as a sketch to be printed by itself, and
79
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
afterwards had continued the story from it. I had
never heard of its acceptance, and supposed of course
that it was rejected; but on my second visit to New
York I called at the Knickerbocker office, and a new
editor, of those that the magazine was always having
in the days of its failing fortunes, told me that he had
found my sketch in rummaging about in a barrel of his
predecessors' manuscripts, and had liked it, and printed
it. He said that there were fifteen dollars coming to
me for that sketch, and might he send the money to me ?
I said that he might, though I do not see, to this day,
why he did riot give it me on the spot; and he made a
very small minute in a very large sheet of paper (really
like Dick Swiveller), and promised I should have it
that night; but I sailed the next day for Liverpool
without it. I sailed without the money for some verses
that Vanity Fair bought of me, but I hardly expected
that, for the editor, who was then Artemus Ward, had
frankly told me in taking my address that ducats were
few at that moment with Vanity Fair.
I was then on my way to be consul at Venice, where
I spent the next four years in a vigilance for Confed
erate privateers which none of them ever surprised. I
had asked for the consulate at Munich, where I hoped
to steep myself yet longer in German poetry, but when
my appointment came, I found it was for Rome. I was
very glad to get Rome even; but the income of the
office was in fees, and I thought I had better go on to
Washington and find out how much the fees amounted
to. People in Columbus who had been abroad said that
on five hundred dollars you could live in Rome like a
prince, but I doubted this ; and when I learned at the
State Department that the fees of the Roman consulate
came to only three hundred, I perceived that I could not
live better than a baron, probably, and I despaired. The
80
MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
kindly chief of the consular bureau said that the Presi
dent's secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John. Hay,
were interested in my appointment, and he advised my
going over to the White House and seeing them. I lost
no time in doing that, and I learned that as young West
ern men they were interested in me because I was a
young Western man who had done something in litera
ture, and they were willing to help me for that reason,
and for no other that I ever knew. They proposed my
going to Venice; the salary was then seven hundred
and fifty, but they thought they could get it put up to
a thousand. In the end they got it put up to fifteen
hundred, and so I went to Venice, where if I did not
live like a prince on that income, I lived a good deal
more like a prince than I could have done at Koine on
a fifth of it.
If the appointment was not present fortune, it was
the beginning of the best luck I have had in the world,
and I am glad to owe it all to those friends of my verse,
who could have been no otherwise friends of me. They
were then beginning very early careers of distinction
which have not been wholly divided. Mr. Nicolay could
have been about twenty-five, and Mr. Hay nineteen ^or
twenty. ~Ko one dreamed as yet of the opportunity
opening to them in being so constantly near the man
whose life they have written, and with whose fame they
have imperishably interwrought their names. I re
member the sobered dignity of the one, and the humor
ous gayety of the other, and how we had some young
men's joking and laughing together, in the anteroom
where they received me, with the great soul entering
upon its travail beyond the closed door. They asked me
if I had ever seen the President, and I said that
seen him at Columbus, the year before ; but I could not
say how much I should like to see him again, and than
J 81
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
him for the favor which I had no claim to at his hands,
except such as the slight campaign biography I had
written could be thought to have given me. That day
or another, as I left my friends, I met him in the corri
dor without, and he looked at the space I was part of
with his ineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing
that I was the indistinguishable person in whose "in
tegrity and abilities he had reposed such special confi
dence " as to have appointed him consul for \7"enice and
the ports of the Lombardo- Venetian Kingdom, though
he might have recognized the terms of my commission
if I had reminded him of them. I faltered a moment
in my longing to address him, and then I decided that
every one who forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to
shake his hand, did him a kindness ; and I wish I could
be as sure of the wisdom of all my past behavior as I
am of that piece of it. He walked up to the water-
cooler that stood in the corner, and drew himself a full
goblet from it, which he poured down his throat with a
backward tilt of his head, and then went wearily within
doors. The whole affair, so simple, has always re
mained one of a certain pathos in my memory, and I
would rather have seen Lincoln in that unconscious
moment than on some statelier occasion.
I went home to Ohio, and sent on the bond I was to
file in the Treasury Department; but it was mislaid
there, and to prevent another chance of that kind I car
ried on the duplicate myself. It was on my second visit
that I met the generous young Irishman William D.
O'Connor, at the house of my friend Piatt, and heard
his ardent talk. He was one of the promising men of
that day, and he had written an anti-slavery novel in
82
MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
the heroic mood of Victor Hugo, which greatly took my
fancy ; and I believe he wrote poems too. lie had not
yet risen to be the chief of Walt Whitman's champions
outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already
espoused the theory of Bacon's authorship of Shake
speare, then newly exploited by the poor lady of Bacon's
name, who died constant to it in an insane asylum. He
used to speak of the reputed dramatist as " the fat
peasant of Stratford," and he was otherwise picturesque
of speech in a measure that consoled, if it did not con
vince. The great war was then full upon us, and when
in the silences of our literary talk its awful breath was
heard, and its shadow fell upon the hearth where we
gathered round the first fires of autumn, O'Connor
would lift his beautiful head with a fine effect of proph
ecy, and say, " Friends, I feel a sense of victory in the
air." He was not wrong; only the victory was for the
other side.
Who beside O'Connor shared in these saddened sym
posiums I cannot tell now; but probably other young
journalists and office-holders, intending litterateurs,
since more or less extinct. I make certain only of the
young Boston publisher who issued a very handsome
edition of Leaves of Grass, and then failed promptly
if not consequently. But I had already met, in my fin
sojourn at the capital, a young journalist who had givci
hostages to poetry, and whom I was very glad to s
and proud to know. Mr. Stedman and I were talkm
over that meeting the other day, and I can ^-er than
I might have been without his memory, that I found
him ft a friend's house, where he was nursing him
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
pose of the literary life; and the world knows without
my telling how true he has been to his ideal of it.
His earthly mission then was to write letters from
Washington for the New York World, which started in
life as a good young evening paper, with a decided reli
gious tone, so that the Saturday Press could call it the
Night-blooming Serious. I think Mr. Stedman wrote
for its editorial page at times, and his relation to it as a
Washington correspondent had an authority which is
wanting to the function in these days of perfected tele
graphing. He had not yet achieved that seat in the
(Stock Exchange whose possession has justified his re
course to business, and has helped him to mean some
thing more single in literature than many more singly
devoted to it. I used sometimes to speak about that
with another eager young author in certain middle
years when we were chafing in editorial harness, and we
always decided that Stedman had the best of it in being
able to earn his living in a sort so alien to literature
that he could come to it un jaded, and with a gust un
spoiled by kindred savors. But no man shapes his own
life, and I dare say that Stedman may have been all the
time envying us our tripods from his high place in the
Stock Exchange. What is certain is that he has come
to stand for literature and to embody New York in it
as no one else does. In a community which seems never
to have had a conscious relation to letters, he has kept
the faith with dignity and fought the fight wiith constant
courage. Scholar and poet at once, he has spoken to
his generation with authority which we can forget only
in the charm which makes us forget everything else.
But his fame was still before him when we met,
and I could bring to him an admiration for work
which had not yet made itself known to so many; but
any admirer was welcome. We talked of what we had
84
MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
done, and each said how much he liked certain things
of the other's ; I even seized my advantage of his help
lessness to read him a poem of mine which I had in my
pocket; he advised me where to place it; and if the
reader will not think it an unfair digression, I will tell
here what became of that poem, for I think its varied
fortunes were amusing, and I hope my own sufferings
and final triumph with it will not be without encourage
ment to the young literary endeavorer. It was a poem
called, with no prophetic sense of fitness, "Forlorn," and
I tried it first with the Atlantic Monthly, which would
not have it. Then I offered it in person to a former
editor of Harper's Monthly, but he could not see his ad
vantage in it, and I carried it overseas to Venice with
me. From that point I sent it to all the English maga
zines as steadily as the post could carry it away and
bring it back. On my way home, four years later, t
took it to London with me, where a friend who knew
Lewes, then just beginning with the Fortnightly Re-
vieiu, sent it to him for me. It was promptly returned,
with a letter wholly reserved as to its quality, but full
of a poetic gratitude for my wish to contribute to the
Fortnightly. Then I heard that a certain Mr. Lucas
was about to start a magazine, and I offered the poem
to him. The kindest letter of acceptance followed me t
America, and I counted upon fame and fortune as
usual, when the news of Mr. Lucas's death came I wil
not poorly joke an effect from my poem in the fact ;
the fact remains. By this time I was a writer m the
office of the Nation newspaper, and after I lei
place to be Mr. Fields's assistant on the Atlantic, I
my poem to the Nation, where it was printed at last
In such scant measure as my verses have pleased it has
found rather unusual favor, and I need not say that its
misfortunes endeared it to its author.
85
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
But all this is rather far away from my first meeting
with Stedmaii in Washington. Of course I liked him,
and I thought him very handsome and fine, with a full
beard cut in the fashion he has always worn it, and with
poet's eyes lighting an aquiline profile. Afterwards,
when I saw him afoot, I found him of a worldly splen
dor in dress, and envied him, as much as I could envy
him anything, the New York tailor whose art had
clothed him: I had a New York tailor too, but with a
difference. He had a worldly dash along with his su
permundane gifts, which took me almost as much, and
all the more because I could see that he valued himself
nothing upon it. He was all for literature, and for
literary men as the superiors of every one. I must
have opened my heart to him a good deal, for when I
told him how the newspaper I had written for from
Canada and New England had ceased to print my let
ters, he said, " Think of a man like sitting in
judgment on a man like you!" I thought of it, and was
avenged if not comforted ; and at any rate I liked Sted-
man's standing up so stiffly for the honor of a craft
that is rather too limp in some of its votaries.
I suppose it was he who introduced me to the Stod-
dards, whom I met in New York just before I sailed,
and who were then in the glow of their early fame as
poets. They knew about my poor beginnings, and they
were very, very good to me. Stoddard went with me
to Franklin Square, and gave the sanction of his pres
ence to the ineffectual offer of my poem there. But
what I relished most was the long talks I had with them
both about authorship in all its phases, and the ex
change of delight in this poem and that, this novel and
that, with gay, wilful runs away to make some wholly-
irrelevant joke, or fire puns into the air at no mark
whatever. Stoddard had then a fame, with the sweet-
86
MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
ness of personal affection in it, from the lyrics and the
odes that will perhaps best keep him known, and Mrs.
Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special
quality felt in the magazines, in verse and fiction. In
both it seems to me that she has failed of the recogni
tion which her work merits. Her tales and novels have
in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for
the palate of their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps.
It is a peculiar fate, and would form the scheme of a
pretty study in the history of literature. But in what
ever she did she left the stamp of a talent like no other,
and of a personality disdainful of literary environ
ment. In a time when most of us had to write like
Tennyson, or Longfellow, or Browning, she never would
write like any one but herself.
I remember very well the lodging over a corner of
Fourth Avenue and some downtown street where I vis
ited these winning and gifted people, and tasted the
pleasure of their racy talk, and the hospitality of their
good-will toward all literature, which certainly did not
leave me out. We sat before their grate in the chill of
the last October days, and they set each other on to one
wild flight of wit after another, and again I bathed my
delighted spirit in the atmosphere of a realm where for
the time at least no
« rumor of oppression or defeat,
Of unsuccessful or successful war,"
could penetrate. I liked the Stoddards because they
were frankly not of that Bohemia which I d.shked i
much, and thought it of no promise or valid, y ;
because I was fond of their poetry and found he
it I liked the absolutely literary keeping of their 1
He had then, and for long after, a place „, the Gusto,,,
house, but he was no more of that than Lamb wa.
87
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
India House. He belonged to that better world where
there is no interest but letters, and which was as much
like heaven for me as anything I could think of.
The meetings with the Stoddards repeated themselves
when I came back to sail from New York, early in No
vember. Mixed up with the cordial pleasure of them in
my memory is a sense of the cold and wet outdoors, and
the misery of being in those infamous New York streets,
then as for long afterwards the squalidest in the world.
The last night I saw my friends they told me of the
tragedy which had just happened at the camp in the
City Hall Park. Fitz James O'Brien, the brilliant
young Irishman who had dazzled us with his story of
" The Diamond Lens/' and frozen our blood with his
ingenious tale of a ghost — " What was It ?" — a ghost
that could be felt and heard, but not seen — had enlisted
for the war, and risen to be an officer with the swift
process of the first days of it. In that camp he had
just then shot and killed a man for some infraction of
discipline, and it was uncertain what the end would be.
He was acquitted, however, and it is known how he
afterwards died of lockjaw from a wound received in
battle.
VI
Before this last visit in New York there was a second
visit to Boston, which I need not dwell upon, because it
was chiefly a revival of the impressions of the first.
Again I saw the Fieldses in their home; again the
Autocrat in his, and Lowell now beneath his own roof,
beside the study fire where I was so often to sit with him
in coming years. At dinner (which we had at two
o'clock) the talk turned upon my appointment, and he
said of me to his wife : " Think of his having got Still-
man's place ! We ought to put poison in his wine," and
88
MY IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK
he told me of the wish the painter had to go to Venice
and follow up Ruskin's work there in a book of his own.
But he would not let me feel very guilty, and I will not
pretend that I had any personal regret for my good
fortune.
The place was given me perhaps because I had not
nearly so many other gifts as he who lost it, and who
was at once artist, critic, journalist, traveller, and emi
nently each. I met him afterwards in Eome, which the
powers bestowed upon him instead of Venice, and he
forgave me, though I do not know whether he forgave
the powers. We walked far and long over the Cam-
pagna, and I felt the charm of a most uncommon mind
in talk which came out richest and fullest in the pres
ence of the wild nature which he loved and knew so
much better than most other men. I think that the book
he would have written about Venice is forever to be re
gretted, and I do not at all console myself for its loss
with the book I have written myself.
At Lowell's table that day they spoke of what sort of
winter I should find in Venice, and he inclined to the
belief that I should want a fire there. On his study
hearth a very brisk one burned when we went back to
it and kept out the chill of a cold easterly storm. We
looked through one of the windows at the ram, and he
said he could remember standing and looking out of
that window at such a storm when he was a child; f.
he was born in that house, and his life had kept coming
back to it. He died in it, at last.
In a lifting of the rain he walked with me down t
the village, as he always called the denser part of •
town about Harvard Square, and saw me aboard a
horse-car for Boston. Before we parted he gave
'charges: to open my mouth when I began to spea
ItaHan, and to think well of women. He said that our
89
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
race spoke its own tongue with its teeth shut, and so
failed to master the languages that wanted freer utter
ance. As to women, he said there were unworthy ones,
but a good woman was the best thing in the world, and
a man was always the better for honoring women.
Part Sbfrfr
ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
•rVlIPJXG the four years of my life in Venice the
literary intention was present with me at all
times and in all places. I wrote many things in verse,
winch I sent to the magazines in every part of the Eng
lish-speaking world, but they came unerringly back to
me, except in three instances only, when they were kept
by the editors who finally printed them. One of these
pieces was published in the Atlantic Monthly; another
in Harpers Magazine; the third was got into the New
York Ledger through the kindness of Doctor Edward
Everett Hale, who used I know not what mighty~magic
to that end. I had not yet met him ; but he interested
himself in my ballad as if it had been his own. His
brother, Charles Hale, later Consul-General for Egypt,
wrhom I saw almost every moment of the two visits he
paid Venice in my time, had sent it to him, after copy
ing it in his own large, fair hand, so that it could be
read. He was not quite of that literary Boston which
I so fondly remembered my glimpses of ; he was rather
of a journalistic and literary Boston which I had never
known ; but he was of Boston, after all. He had been
in Lowell's classes at Harvard ; he had often met Long
fellow in Cambridge; he knew Doctor Holmes, of
course; and he let me talk of my idols to my heart's
content. I think he must have been amused by my rapt
ures; most people would have been; but he was kind
91
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
and patient, and he listened to me with a sweet intelli
gence which I shall always gratefully remember. He
died too young, with his life's possibilities mainly un
fulfilled ; but none who knew him could fail to imagine
them, or to love him for what he was.
Besides those few pitiful successes, I had nothing
but defeats in the sort of literature which I supposed
was to be my calling, and the defeats threw me upon
prose; for some sort of literary thing, if not one, then
another, I must do if I lived; and I began to write
those studies of Venetian life which afterwards became
a book, and which I contributed as letters to the Boston
'Advertiser., after vainly offering them to more esthetic
periodicals. However, I do not imagine that it was
a very smiling time for any literary endeavorer at
home in the life-and-death civil war then waging.
Some few young men arose who made themselves
heard amid the din of arms even as far as Venice, but
most of these were hushed long ago. I fancy Theodore
Winthrop, who began to speak, as it were, from his
soldier's grave, so soon did his death follow the earliest
recognition by the public, and so many were his pos
thumous works, was chief of these; but there were
others whom the present readers must make greater
effort to remember. Forceythe <Willson,who wrote The
Old Sergeant, became known for the rare quality
of his poetry; and now and then there came a poem
from Aldrich, or Stedman, or Stoddard. The great
new series of the Biglow Papers gathered volume with
the force they had from the beginning. The Autocrat
was often in the pages of the Atlantic, where one often
found Whittier and Emerson, with many a fresh name
92
ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
now faded. In Washington the Piatts were writing
some of the most beautiful verse of the war, and
Brownell was sounding his battle lyrics like so many
trumpet blasts. The fiction which followed the war
was yet all to come. Whatever was done in any kind
had some hint of the war in it, inevitably; though in
the very heart of it Longfellow was setting about his
great version of Dante peacefully, prayerfully, as he
has told in the noble sonnets which register the mood
of his undertaking.
At Venice, if I was beyond the range of literary
recognition I was in direct relations with one of our
greatest literary men, who was again of that literary
Boston which mainly represented American literature
to me. The official chief of the consul at Venice was
the United States Minister at Vienna, and in my time
this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the historian.
He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration
which followed Lincoln's so forgottenly that I name
it with a sense of something almost prehistoric.
Among its worst errors was the attempted discredit
of a man who had given lustre to our name by his
work, and who was an ardent patriot as well as accom
plished scholar. He visited Venice during my first
year, which was the darkest period of the civil war,
and I remember with what instant security, not to say
severity, he rebuked my scarcely whispered misgivings
of the end, when I ventured to ask him what he though
it would be. Austria had never recognized the
cessionists as belligerents, and in the complications
with France and England there was little for our
ister but to share the home indignation at the sympathy
of those powers with the South. In Motley this was
heightened by that feeling of astonishment of wounc
ed faith, which all Americans with English friend-
93
ships experienced in those days, and which he, whose
English friendships were many, experienced in pecu
liar degree.
I drifted about with him in his gondola, and refresh
ed myself, long a-hungered for such talk, with his talk
of literary life in London. Through some acquain
tance I had made in Venice I was able to be of use to
him in getting documents copied for him in the Vene
tian Archives, especially the Relations of the Vene
tian Ambassadors at different courts during the period
and events he was studying. All such papers passed
through my hands in transmission to the historian,
though now I do not quite know why they need have
done so; but perhaps he was willing to give me the
pleasure of being a partner, however humble, in the
enterprise. My recollection of him is of courtesy to a
far younger man unqualified by patronage, and of a
presence of singular dignity and grace. He was one
of the handsomest men I ever saw, with beautiful eyes,
a fine blond beard of modish cut, and a sensitive nose,
straight and fine. He was altogether a figure of world
ly splendor ; and I had reason to know that he did not
let the credit of our nation suffer at the most aristo
cratic court in Europe for want of a fit diplomatic
costume, when some of our ministers were trying to
make their office do its full effect upon all occasions in
" the dress of an American gentleman." The morn
ing after his arrival Mr. Motley came to me with a
handful of newspapers which, according to the Aus
trian custom at that day, had been opened in the Vene
tian post-office. He wished me to protest against this
on his behalf as an infringement of his diplomatic
extra-territoriality, and I proposed to go at once to the
director of the post : I had myself suffered in the same
way, and though I knew that a mere consul was help-
94
EOUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
less, I was willing to see the double-headed eagle trod
den under foot by a Minister Plenipotentiary. Mr.
Motley said that he would go with me, and we put off in
his gondola to the post-office. The director received us
with the utmost deference. He admitted the irregu
larity which the minister complained of, and declared
that he had no choice but to open every foreign news
paper, to whomsoever addressed. He suggested, how
ever, that if the minister made his appeal to the Lieu
tenant-Governor of Venice, Count Toggenburg would
no doubt instantly order the exemption of his news
papers from the general rule.
Mr. Motley said he would give himself the pleasure
of calling upon the Lieutenant-Governor, and " How
fortunate," he added, when we were got back into the
gondola, " that I should have happened to bring my
court dress with me!" I did not see the encounter
of the high contending powers, but I know that it end
ed in a complete victory for our minister.
I had no further active relations of an official kind
with Mr. Motley, except in the case of a naturalized
American citizen, whose property was slowly but sure
ly wasting away in the keeping of the Venetian courts
An order had at last been given for the surrender of
the remnant to the owner; but the Lombardo-Venetian
authorities insisted that this should be done through
the United States Minister at Vienna, and Mr. Mo
held as firmly that it must be done through the Unite
States Consul at Venice. I could only report to h
from time to time the unyielding attitude of the (
Tribunal, and at last he consented, as he ; wrote
officiously, not officially, in the matter," and the hap
less claimant got what was left of Ins estate
I had a glimpse of the historian afterwards in I
ton, but it was only for a moment, just before his ap-
95
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
pointment to England, where he was made to suffer for
Sumner in his quarrel with Grant. That injustice
crowned the injuries his country had done a most faith
ful patriot and high-spirited gentleman, whose fame as
an, historian once filled the ear of the English-speaking
world. His books seemed to have been written in a
spirit already no longer modern ; and I did not find the
greatest of them so moving as I expected when I came
to it with all the ardor of my admiration for the his
torian. William the Silent seemed to me, by his
worshipper's own showing, scarcely level with the
popular movement which he did not so much direct as
follow ; but it is a good deal for a prince to be able even
to follow his people ; and it cannot be said that Motley
does not fully recognize the greatness of the Dutch
people, though he may see the Prince of Orange too
large. The study of their character made at least a
theoretical democrat of a scholar whose instincts were
not perhaps democratic, and his sympathy with that
brave little republic between the dikes strengthened him
in his fealty to the great commonwealth between the
oceans. I believe that so far as he was of any political
tradition, he was of the old Boston Whig tradition;
but when I met him at Venice he was in the glow of a
generous pride in our war as a war against slavery.
He spoke of the negroes and their simple-hearted,
single-minded devotion to the Union cause in terms
that an original abolitionist might have used, at a time
when original abolitionists were not so many as they
have since become.
For the rest, I fancy it was very well for us to be
represented at Vienna in those days by an ideal demo
crat who was also a real swell, and who was not likely
to discredit us socially when we so much needed to be
well thought of in every way. At a court where the
96
ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
family of Count Schmerling, the Prime Minister,
could not be received for want of the requisite descents,
it was well to have a minister who would not commit
the mistake of inviting the First Society to meet the
Second Society, as a former Envoy Extraordinary had
done, with the effect of finding himself left entirely
to the Second Society during the rest of his stay in
Vienna.
II
One of my consular colleagues under Motley was
another historian, of no such popularity, indeed, nor
even of such success, but perhaps not of inferior powers.
This was Richard Hildreth, at Trieste, the author of
one of the sincerest if not the truest histories of
the United States, according to the testimony both of his
liking and his misliking critics. I have never read his
history, and I speak of it only at second hand; but I
had read, before I met him, his novel of Archy Moore,
or The White Slave, which left an indelible impres
sion of his imaginative verity upon me. The impres
sion is still so deep that after the lapse of nearly forty
years since I saw the book, I have no misgiving in
speaking of it as a powerful piece of realism. It
treated passionately, intensely, though with a superficial
coldness, of wrongs now so remote from us in the aboli
tion of slavery that it is useless to hope it will ever be
generally read hereafter, but it can safely be praised to
any one who wishes to study that bygone condition,
and the literature which grew out of it. I fancy it did
not lack recognition in its time, altogether, for I used
to see it in Italian and French translations on the book
stalls. I believe neither his history nor his novel
brought the author more gain than fame. He had worn
himself out on a newspaper when he got his'appoint-
97
ment at Trieste, and I saw him in the shadow of the
cloud that was wholly to darken him before he died.
He was a tall, thin man, absent, silent: already a phan
tom of himself, but with a scholarly serenity and dig
nity amidst the ruin, when the worst came.
I first saw him at the pretty villa where he lived in
the suburbs of Trieste, and where I passed several days,
and I remember him always reading, reading, reading.
He could with difficulty be roused from his book by
some strenuous appeal from his family to his conscience
as a host. The last night he sat with Paradise Lost
in his hand, and nothing could win him from it till he
had finished it. Then he rose to go to bed. Would not
he bid his parting guest good-bye ? The idea of farewell
perhaps dimly penetrated to him. He responded with
out looking round,
" They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way,"
and so left the room.
I had earlier had some dealings with him as a fellow-
consul concerning a deserter from an American ship
whom I inherited from my predecessor at Venice. The
man had already been four or five months in prison,
and he was in a fair way to end his life there ; for it is
our law that a deserting sailor must be kept in the con
sul's custody till some vessel of our flag arrives, when
the consul can oblige the master to take the deserter
and let him work his passage home. Such a vessel
rarely came to Venice even in times of peace, and in
times of war there was no hope of any. So I got leave
of the consul at Trieste to transfer my captive to that
port, where now and then an American ship did touch.
The flag determines the nationality of the sailor, and
this unhappy wretch was theoretically our fellow-citi-
,98
ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
zen; but when lie got to Trieste he made a clean breast
of it to the consul. He confessed that when he shipped
under our flag he was a deserter from a British regi
ment at Malta ; and he begged piteously not to be sent
home to America, where he had never been in his life,
nor^ever wished to be. He wished to be sent back to his
regiment at Malta, and to whatever fate awaited him
there. The case certainly had its embarrassments ; but
the American consul contrived to let our presumptive
compatriot slip into the keeping of the British consul,
who promptly shipped him to Malta. In view of the
strained relations between England and America at that
time this was a piece of masterly diplomacy.
Besides my old Ohio-time friend Moncure D. Con-
way, who paid us a visit, and in his immediate rela
tions with literary Boston seemed to bring the moun
tain to Mahomet, I saw no one else more literary than
Henry Ward Beecher. He was passing through Venice
on his way to those efforts in England in behalf of the
Union which had a certain great effect at the time ; and
in the tiny parlor of our apartment on the Grand Canal,
I can still see him sitting athletic, almost pugilistic, of
presence, with his strong face, but kind, framed in long
hair that swept above his massive forehead, and fell to
the level of his humorously smiling mouth. His eyes
quaintly gleamed at the things we told him of our life
in the strange place ; but he only partly relaxed from his
strenuous pose, and the hands that lay upon his knees
were clinched. Afterwards, as he passed our balcony
in a gondola, he lifted the brave red fez he was wearing
(many people wore the fez for one caprice or another)
and saluted our eagle and us: we were often on tliD
balcony behind the shield to attest the authenticity of
the American eagle.
LITEKAKY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
III
Before I left Venice, however, there came a turn in
my literary luck, and from the hand I could most have
wished to reverse the adverse wheel of fortune. I had
labored out with great pains a paper on recent Italian
comedy, which I sent to Lowell, then with his friend
Professor Norton jointly editor of the North American
Review; and he took it and wrote me one of his loveli
est letters about it, consoling me in an instant for all
the defeat I had undergone, and making it sweet and
worthy to have lived through that misery. It is one of
the hard conditions of this state that while we can most
ly make out to let people taste the last drop of bitter
ness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are
only semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether
tongue-tied. As often as I tried afterwards to tell Low
ell of the benediction, the salvation, his letter was to
me, I failed. But perhaps he would not have under
stood, if I had spoken out all that was in me with the
fulness I could have given a resentment. His mes
sage came after years of thwarted endeavor, and rein
stated me in the belief that I could still do something
in literature. To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser
had begun to make their impression; among the first
great pleasures they brought me was a recognition from
my diplomatic chief at Vienna; but I valued my ad
mission to the North American peculiarly because it
was Lowell let me in, and because I felt that in his
charge it must be the place of highest honor. He spoke
of the pay for my article, in his letter, and asked me
where he should send it, and I answered, to my father-
in-law, who put it in his savings-bank, where he lived,
in Brattleboro, Vermont. There it remained, and I for-
100
KOUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
got all about it, so that when his affairs were settled
some years later and I was notified that there was a sum
to my credit in the bank, I said, with the confidence I
have nearly always felt when wrong, that I had no
money there. The proof of my error was sent me in a
check, and then I bethought me of the pay for " Recent
Italian Comedy."
It was not a day when I could really afford to forget
money due me, but then it was not a great deal of
money. The Review was as poor as it was proud, and
I had two dollars a printed page for my paper. But
this was more than I got from the Advertiser, which
gave me five dollars a column for my letters, printed in
a type so fine that the money, when translated from
greenbacks into gold at a discount of $2.80, must have
been about a dollar a thousand words. However, I was
richly content with that, and would gladly have let them
have the letters for nothing.
Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a
book, which I sent on to Messrs. Triibner £ Co., in
London. They had consented to look at it to oblige my
friend Conway, who during his sojourn with us in
Venice, before his settlement in London, had been
forced to listen to some of it. They answered me in
due time that they would publish an edition of a thou
sand, at half profits, if I could get some American
house to take five hundred copies. When I stopped in
London I had so little hope of being able to do this that
I asked the Triibners if I might, without losing their
offer try to get some other London house to publish
mv book. They said Yes, almost joyously ; and I began
to" take my manuscript about. At most places
would not look at me or it, and they nowhere consente
to read it. The house promptest in refusing
sider it afterwards pirated one of my novels, and with
101
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
some expressions of good intention in that direction,
never paid me anything for it; though I believe the
English still think that this sort of behavior was pecul
iar to the American publisher in the old buccaneering
times. I was glad to go back to the Triibners with my
book, and on my way across the Atlantic I met a pub
lisher who finally agreed to take those five hundred
copies. This was Mr. M. M. Ilurd, of Ilurd & Hough-
ton, a house then newly established in New York and
Cambridge. We played ring-toss and shuffleboard to
gether, and became of a friendship which lasts to this
day. But it was not till some months later, when I saw
him in !N^ew York, that he consented to publish my
book. I remember how he said, with an air of vague
misgiving, and an effect of trying to justify himself
in an imprudence, that it was not a great matter any
way. I perceived that he had no faith in it, and to tell
the truth I had not much myself. But the book had an
instant success, and it has gone on from edition to edi
tion ever since. There was just then the interest of a
not wholly generous surprise at American things among
the English. Our success in putting down the great
Confederate rebellion had caught the fancy of our
cousins, and I think it was to this mood of theirs that
I owed largely the kindness they showed my book.
There were long and cordial reviews in all the great
London journals, which I used to carry about with me
like love-letters ; when I tried to show them to other
people, I could not understand their coldness concern
ing them.
At Boston, where we landed on our return home,
there was a moment when it seemed as if my small
destiny might be linked at once with that of the city
which later became my home. I ran into the office of
the Advertiser to ask what had become of some sketches
102
of ^ Italian travel I had sent the paper, and the man-
aging editor made me promise not to take a place any
where before I had heard from him. I gladly prom
ised, but I did not hear from him, and when I returned
to Boston a fortnight later, I found that a fatal partner
had refused to agree with him in engaging me upon the
paper. They even gave me back half a dozen imprinted
letters of mine, and I published them in the Nation, of
New York, and afterwards in the book called Italian
Journeys.
But after I had encountered fortune in this frown
ing disguise, I had a most joyful little visit with Lowell,
which made me forget there was anything in the world
but the delight and glory of sitting with him in his
study at Elmwood and hearing him talk. It must have
been my freshness from Italy which made him talk
chiefly of his own happy days in the land which so
sympathetically brevets all its lovers fellow-citizens.
At any rate he would talk of hardly anything else, and
he talked late into the night, and early into the morn
ing. About two o'clock, when all the house was still,
he lighted a candle, and went down into the cellar, and
came back with certain bottles under his arms. I had
not a very learned palate in those days (or in these, for
that matter), but I knew enough of wine to under
stand that these bottles had been chosen upon that prin
ciple which Longfellow put in verse, and used to re
peat with a humorous lifting of the eyebrows and hol
lowing of the voice :
" If you have a friend to dine,
Give him your best wine;
If you have two,
The second-best will do."
As we sat in their mellow afterglow, Lowell spoke to
me of my own life and prospects, wisely and truly, as
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
he always spoke. He said that it was enough for a man
who had stuff in him to be known to two or three peo
ple, for they would not suffer him to be forgotten, and
it would rest with himself to get on. I told him that
though I had not given up my place at Venice, I was
not going back, if I could find anything to do at home,
and I was now on my way to Ohio, where I should try
my best to find something; at the worst, I could turn to
my trade of printer. He did not think it need ever
come to that; and he said that he believed I should
have an advantage with readers, if not with editors, in
hailing from the West ; I should be more of a novelty.
I knew very well that even in my own West I should
not have this advantage unless I appeared there with an
Eastern imprint, but I 'could not wish to urge my mis
giving against his faith. Was I not already richly suc
cessful ? What better thing personally could befall
me, if I lived forever after on milk and honey, than
to be sitting there with my hero, my master, and hav
ing him talk to me as if we were equal in deed and in
fame?
The cat-bird called in the syringa thicket at his door,
before we said the good-night which was good-morning,
using the sweet Italian words, and bidding each other
the Dorrna bcne which has the quality of a benediction.
He held my hand, and looked into my eyes with the
sunny kindness which never failed me, worthy or un
worthy ; and I went away to bed. But not to sleep ;
only to dream such dreams as fill the heart of youth
when the recognition of its endeavor has come from the
achievement it holds highest and best.
ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
IV
I found nothing to do in Ohio; some places that 1
heard of proved impossible one way or another, in
Columbus and Cleveland, and Cincinnati; there was
always the fatal partner ; and after three weeks I was
again in the East. I came to New York, resolved to
fight my way in, somewhere, and I did not rest a mo
ment before I began the fight.
My notion was that which afterwards became Bartley
Hubbard's. " Get a basis," said the softening cynic of
the Saturday Press, when I advised with him, among
other acquaintances. " Get a salaried place, something
regular on some paper, and then you can easily make
up the rest." But it was a month before I achieved this
vantage, and then I got it in a quarter where I had not
looked for it. I wrote editorials on European and lit
erary topics for different papers, but mostly for the
Times, and they paid me well and more than well ; but
I \vas nowhere offered a basis, though once I got so far
towards it as to secure a personal interview with the
editor-in-chief, who made me feel that I had seldom
met so busy a man. He praised some work of mine
that he had read in his paper, but I was never recalled
to his presence ; and now I think he judged rightly that
I should not be a lastingly good journalist. My point
of view was artistic; I wanted time to prepare my
effects.
There was another and clearer prospect opened to
me on a literary paper, then newly come to the light,
but long since gone out in the dark. Here again my
work was taken, and liked so much that I was offered
the basis (at twenty dollars a week) that I desired; I
was even assigned to a desk where I should write in the
office ; and the next morning I came joyfully down to
105
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Spruce Street to occupy it. But I was met at the door
by one of the editors, who said lightly, as if it were a
trifling affair, " Well, we've concluded to waive the idea
of an engagement," and once more my bright hopes of
a basis dispersed themselves. I said, with what calm
I could, that they must do what they thought best, and
I went on skirmishing baselessly about for this and the
other papers which had been buying my material.
I had begun printing in the Nation those letters
about my Italian journeys left over from the Boston
Advertise)'; they had been liked in the office, and one
day the editor astonished and delighted me by asking
how I would fancy giving up outside work to come
there and write only for the Nation. We averaged my
gains from all sources at forty dollars a week, and I
had my basis as unexpectedly as if I had dropped upon
it from the skies.
This must have been some time in November, and
the next three or four months were as happy a time for
me as I have ever known. I kept on printing my
Italian material in the Nation; I wrote criticisms for it
(not very good criticisms, I think now), and I amused
myself very much with the treatment of social phases
and events in a department which grew up under my
hand. My associations personally were of the most
agreeable kind. I worked with joy, with ardor, and I
liked so much to be there, in that place and in that com
pany, that I hated to have each day come to an end.
I believed that my lines were cast in New York for
good and all ; and I renewed my relations with the lit
erary friends I had made before going abroad. I often
stopped, on my way up town, at an apartment the Stod-
dards had in Lafayette Place, or near it; I saw Sted-
man, and reasoned high, to my heart's content, of lit
erary things with them and him.
106
ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
With the winter Bayard Taylor came on from hi*
home in Kennctt and took an apartment in East
Twelfth Street, and once a week Mrs. Taylor and he
received all their friends there, with a simple and
charming hospitality. There was another house which
we much resorted to— the house of James Lorrimer
Graham, afterwards Consul-General at Florence, where
he died. I had made his acquaintance at Venice three
years before, and I came in for my share of that love
for literary men which all their perversities could not
extinguish in him. It was a veritable passion, which I
used to think he could not have felt so deeply if he had
been a literary man himself. There were delightful
dinners at his house, where the wit of the Stoddards
shone, and Taylor beamed with joyous good-fellowship
and overflowed with invention; and Huntington, long
Paris correspondent of the Tribune, humorously tried
to talk himself into the resolution of spending the rest
of his life in his own country. There was one evening
when G. P. Cranch, always of a most pensive presence
and aspect, sang the most killingly comic songs; and
there was another evening when, after we all went into
the library, something tragical happened. Edwin
Booth was of our number, a gentle, rather silent per
son in company, or with at least little social initia
tive, who, as his fate would, went up to the cast of a
huge hand that lay upon one of the shelves. " Whose
hand is this, Lorry ?" he asked our host, as he took it up
and turned it over in both his own hands. Graham
feigned not to hear, and Booth asked again, " Whose
hand is this?" Then there was nothing for Graham
but to say, "It's Lincoln's hand," and the man for
whom it meant such unspeakable things put it softly
down without a word.
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
It was one of the disappointments of a time which
was nearly all joy that I did not then meet a man who
meant hardly less than Lowell himself for me. George
William Curtis was during my first winter in New
York away on one of the long lecturing rounds to which
he gave so many of his winters, and I did not see him
till seven years afterwards, at Mr. Norton's in Cam
bridge. He then characteristically spent most of the
evening in discussing an ohscure point in Browning's
poem of My Last Duchess. I have long forgotten what
the point was, but not the charm of Curtis's person
ality, his fine presence, his benign politeness, his almost
deferential tolerance of difference in opinion. After
wards I saw him again and again in Boston and New
York, but always with a sense of something elusive in
his graciousness, for which something in me must have
been to blame. Cold, he was not, even to the youth
that in those days was apt to shiver in any but the
higher temperatures, and yet I felt that I made no
advance in his kindness towards anything like the
friendship I knew in the Cambridge men. Perhaps I
was so thoroughly attuned to their mood that I could
not be put in unison with another; and perhaps in
Curtis there was really not the material of much in
timacy.
He had the potentiality of publicity in the sort of
welcome he gave equally to all men; and if I asked
more I was not reasonable. Yet he was never far from
any man of good - will, and he was the intimate of
multitudes whose several existence he never dreamt of.
In this sort he had become my friend when he made
his first great speech on the Kansas question in 1855,
108
ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
which will seem as remote to the young men of this
day as the Thermopylae question to which he likened
it. I was his admirer, his lover, his worshipper be
fore that for the things he had done in literature, for
the Howadji books, and for the lovely fantasies of
Prue and I, and for the sound-hearted satire of the
Potiphar Papers, and now suddenly I learnt that
this brilliant and graceful talent, this travelled and
accomplished gentleman, this star of society who had
dazzled me with his splendor far off in my Western
village obscurity, was a man with the heart to feel
the wrongs of men so little friended then as to be
denied all the rights of men. I do not remember
any passage of the speech, or any word of it, but I
remember the joy, the pride with which the soul of
youth recognizes in the greatness it has honored the
goodness it may love. Mere politicians might be pro-
slavery or anti-slavery without touching me very much,
but here was the citizen of a world far greater than
theirs, a light of the universal republic of letters, who
was willing and eager to stand or fall with the just
cause, and that was all in all to me. His country was
my country, and his kindred my kindred, and nothing
could have kept me from following after him.
His whole life taught the lesson that the world is
well lost whenever the world is wrong; but never, I
think, did any life teach this so sweetly, so winningly.
The wrong world itself might have been entreated by
him to be^ right, for he was one of the few reformers
who have not in some measure mixed their love of man
with hate of men; his quarrel was with error, and not
with the persons who were in it. He was so gently
steadfast in his opinions that no one ever thought
him as a fanatic, though many who held his opinions
were assailed as fanatics, and suffered the shame if they
109
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
did not win the palm of martyrdom. In early life he
was a communist, and then when he came out of Brook
Farm into the world which he was so well fitted to
adorn, and which would so gladly have kept him all
its own, he became an abolitionist in the very teeth of
the world which abhorred abolitionists. He was a be
liever in the cause of women's rights, which has no
picturesqueness, and which chiefly appeals to the sense
of humor in the men who never dreamt of laughing at
him. The man who was in the last degree amiable was
to the last degree unyielding where conscience was con
cerned; the soul which was so tender had no weakness
in it; his lenity was the divination of a finer justice.
His honesty made all men trust him when they doubted
his opinions ; his good sense made them doubt their own
opinions, when they had as little question of their own
honesty.
I should not find it easy to speak of him as a man of
letters only, for humanity was above the humanities
with him, and we all know how he turned from the
fairest career in literature to tread the thorny path of
politics because he believed that duty led the way, and
that good citizens were needed more than good ro
mancers. No doubt they are, and yet it must always be
a keen regret with the men of my generation who wit
nessed with such rapture the early proofs of his talent,
that he could not have devoted it wholly to the beauti
ful, and let others look after the true. Now that I
have said this I am half ashamed of it, for I know well
enough that what he did was best ; but if my regret is
mean, I will let it remain, for it is faithful to the mood
which many have been in concerning him.
There can be no dispute, I am sure, as to the value
of some of the results he achieved in that other path.
He did indeed create anew for us the type of good-citi-
110
ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON
zenship, wellnigh effaced in a sordid and selfish time,
and of an honest politician and a pure-minded journal
ist. He never really forsook literature, and the world
of actual interests and experiences afforded him outlooks
and perspectives, without \vhich [esthetic endeavor is
self-limited and purblind. He was a great man of let
ters, he was a great orator, he 'was a great political
journalist, he was a great citizen, he was a great philan
thropist. But that last word with its conventional ap
plication scarcely describes the brave and gentle friend
of men that he was. He was one that helped others by
all that he did, and said, and was, and the circle of his
use was as wide as his fame. There are other great
men, plenty of them, common great men, whom we
know as names and powers, and whom we willingly let
the ages have when they die, for, living or dead, they are
alike remote from us. They have never been with us
where we live ; but this great man was the neighbor, the
contemporary, and the friend of all who read him or
heard him ; "and even in the swift forgetting of this
electrical age the stamp of his personality will not be
effaced from their minds or hearts.
VI
Of those evenings at the Taylors' in New York, I can
recall best the one which was most significant for me,
and even fatefully significant. Mr. and Mrs. Fields
were there, from Boston, and I renewed all the pleasure
of my earlier meetings with them. At the end Fields
said, mockingly, "Don't despise Boston!" and
swered, as we shook hands, " Few are worthy to live in
Boston." It was New-Year's eve, and that night it came
on to snow so heavily that my horse-car could hardly
plough its way up to Forty-seventh Street through the
111
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
drifts. The next day, and the next, I wrote at home,
because it was so hard to get down-town. The third day
I reached the office and found a letter on my desk from
Fields, asking how I should like to come to Boston and
be his assistant on the Atlantic Monthly. I submitted
the matter at once to my chief on the Nation., and with
his frank good-will I talked it over with Mr. Osgood, of
Ticknor & Fields, who was to see me further about it if
I wished, when he came to New York ; and then I went
to Boston to see Mr. Fields concerning details. I was
to sift all the manuscripts and correspond with con
tributors ; I was to do the literary proof-reading of the
magazine ; and I was to write the four or five pages of
book-notices, which were then printed at the end of the
periodical in finer type ; and I was to have forty dollars
a week. I said that I was getting that already for less
work, and then Mr. Fields offered me ten dollars more.
Upon these terms we closed, and on the 1st of March,
which was my twenty-ninth birthday, I went to Boston
and began my work. I had not decided to accept the
place without advising with Lowell; he counselled the
step, and gave me some shrewd and useful suggestions.
The whole affair was conducted by Fields with his un
failing tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from
me that the qualification I had as practical printer for
the work was most valued, if not the most valued, and
that as proof-reader I was expected to make it avail on
the side of economy. Somewhere in life's feast the
course of humble-pie must always come in ; and if I did
not wholly relish this bit of it, I dare say it was good for
me, and I digested it perfectly.
part ffouttb
LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
A MOXG my fellow-passengers on the train from
-£*- K"ew York to Boston, when I went to begin my
work there in 1366, as the assistant editor of the At
lantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the
Springfield Republican, who created in a subordinate
city a journal of metropolitan importance. I had met
him in Venice several years earlier, when he was suf
fering from the cruel insomnia which had followed
his overwork on that newspaper, and when he told me
that he was sleeping scarcely more than one hour out
of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the misery
which this must have been, and which lasted in some
measure while he lived, though I believe that rest
and travel relieved him in his later years. He was
always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now ex
pressed a most gratifying interest when I -told him
what I was going to do in Boston. He gave himself
the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality
of the fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was
about to share in the destinies of the great literary
periodical of iSTew England.
I do not think that such a fact would now move the
fancy of the liveliest newspaper man, so much has the
113.
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
West since returned upon the East in a refluent wave
of authorship. But then the West was almost an un
known quality in our literary problem; and in fact
there was scarcely any literature outside of New Eng
land. Even this was of New England origin, for it
was almost wholly the work of New England men
and women in the " splendid exile " of New York.
The Atlantic Monthly, which was distinctively lit
erary, was distinctively a New England magazine,
though from the first it had been characterized
by what was more national, what was more
universal, in the New England temperament. Its
chief contributors for nearly twenty years were
Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Emerson, Doc
tor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple,
Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Pres-
cott Spofford, Mrs. Phelps Ward, and other New Eng
land writers who still lived in New England, and
largely in the region of Boston. Occasionally there
came a poem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr.
Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and Mrs. Stoddard, from
Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these,
except the last, were not only of New England race,
but of New England birth. I think there was no con
tributor from the South but Mr. M. D. Conway, and as
yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poets
from Ohio, who were not immediately or remotely of
Puritan origin, had appeared in early numbers; Alice
Gary, living with her sister in New York, had written
now and then from the beginning. Mr. John Hay
solely represented Illinois by a single paper, and he
was of Rhode Island stock. It was after my settle
ment at Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri, became
a figure of world-wide fame at Hartford ; and longer
after, that Mr. Bret Harte made that progress East-
114
LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
ward from California which was telegraphed almost
from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a
prince. Miss Constance F. Woolson had not yet be
gun to write. Mr. James Whitcomb Riley, Mr. Mau
rice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet,
Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller,
Mrs. Catherwood, Mr. Hamlin Garland, all whom I
name at random among other Western writers, were then
as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives
Chanler, Miss Grace King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris,
Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the South, which they by
no means fully represent.
The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the
beginning to discover any outlying literature; but, as
I have said, there was in those days very little good
writing done beyond the borders of New England. If
the case is now different, and the best known among
living American writers are no longer New-England-
ers, still I do not think the South and West have yet
trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the new
writers now more commonly appear in those quarters,
I should not be so very sure that they are not still
characterized by New England ideals and examples.
On the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day
we were characterized by them, and wished to be so;
we even felt that we failed in so far as we expressed
something native quite in our own way. The literary
theories we accepted were New England theories, the
criticism we valued was New England criticism, or,
more strictly speaking, Boston theories, Boston criti
cism.
II
Of those more constant contributors to the 'Atlantic
I have mentioned, it is of course known that
115
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Longfellow and Lowell lived in Cambridge, Emerson
at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel Hig-
ginson was still and for many years afterwards at
Newport ; Mrs. Stowe was then at Andover ; Miss Pres-
cott of Newburyport had become Mrs. Spofford, and
was presently in Boston, where her husband was a
member of the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as
Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, dwelt in her father's
house at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were
Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor
Hale. Yet Boston stood for the whole Massachusetts
group, and Massachusetts, in the literary impulse,
meant New England. I suppose we must all allow,
whether we like to do so or not, that the impulse seems
now to have pretty well spent itself. Certainly the
city of Boston has distinctly waned in literature,
though it has waxed in wealth and population. I do
not think there are in Boston to-day even so many tal
ents with a literary coloring in law, science, theology,
and journalism as there were formerly; though I have
no belief that the Boston talents are fewer or feebler
than before. I arrived in Boston, however, when all
talents had more or less a literary coloring, and when
the greatest talents were literary. These expressed
with ripened fulness a civilization conceived in faith
and brought forth in good works; but that moment of
maturity was the beginning of a decadence which
could only show itself much later. New England has
ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will perhaps never
again have anything like a national literature; but
that was something like a national literature; and it
will probably be centuries yet before the life of the
whole country, the American life as distinguished
from the New England life, shall have anything so
like a national literature. It will be long before our
116
LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
larger life interprets itself in such imagination as
Hawthorne's, such wisdom as Emerson's, such poetry
as Longfellow's, such prophecy as Whittier's, such wit
and grace as Holmes's, such humor and humanity as
Tin <*
Lowell's.
The literature of those great men was, if I may suf
fer myself the figure, the Socinian graft of a Calvinist
stock. Their faith, in its varied shades, was Unitari
an, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was imper
fect — and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had
its imperfections — it was marred by the intense ethi-
cism that pervaded the New England mind for two
hundred years, and that still characterizes it. They
or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in
the great schism at the beginning of the century, but,
as if their heterodoxy were conscience-stricken, they
still helplessly pointed the moral in all they did ; some
pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they
all pointed it. I should be far from blaming them
for their ethical intention, though I think they felt
their vocation as prophets too much for their good as
poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the ser
mon, though not always, nor nearly always. It was in
poetry and in romance that they excelled ; in the novel,
so far as they attempted it, they failed. I say this
with the names of all the Bostonian group, and those
they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their
greatness. It may be ungracious to say that they have
left no heirs to their peculiar greatness ; but it would
be foolish to say that they left an estate where they had
none to bequeath. One cannot take account of such a
fantasy as Judd's Margaret. The only New-England-
er who has attempted the novel on a scale proportioned
to the work of the New-Englanders in philosophy, in
poetry, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Haven, and not of Boston. I do not forget the fictions
of Doctor Holmes, or the vivid inventions of Doctor
Hale, but I do not call them novels ; and I do not for
get the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss
Wilkins, which is free from the ethicism of the great
New England group, but which has hardly the novel-
ists's scope. New England, in Hawthorne's work,
achieved supremacy in romance ; but the romance is
always an allegory, and the novel is a picture in which
the truth to life is suffered to do its unsermonized
office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her
novelist, because it was her instinct and her conscience
in fiction to be true to an ideal of life rather than to life
itself.
Even when we come to the exception that proves the
rule, even to such a signal exception as Uncle Tom's
Cabin, I think that what I say holds true. That is
almost the greatest work of imagination that we have
produced in prose, and it is the work of a New Eng
land woman, writing from all the inspirations and tra
ditions of New England. It is like begging the ques
tion to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but
really, is it a novel, in the sense that War and Peace
is a novel, or Madame Flaubert, or L'Assommoir, or
Fhineas Finn, or Dona Perfecta, or Esther Waters,
or Maria y Maria, or The Return of the Native, or
Virgin Soil, or David Grieve? In a certain way it is
greater than any of these except the first ; but its chief
virtue, or its prime virtue, is in its address to the con
science, and not its address to the taste; to the ethical
sense, not the aesthetical sense.
This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it,
and I should be sorry if it conveyed to any reader a
sense of slight ; for I believe no one has felt more deep
ly than myself the value of New England in literature.
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LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to
the literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the
reviewers has never seemed to me accurate or adequate,
and it holds chiefly in the fact that both seem to be of
the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in
literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more
than Edinburgh ever was, at least in quality. The
Scotch literature of the palmy days was not wholly
Scotch, and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it
flowered in the air of an alien speech. But the New
England literature of the great day was the blossom of
a New England root ; and the language which the Bos-
tonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly
the heirs of those who had brought the learning of the
universities to Massachusetts Bay two hundred years
before, and was of as pure a lineage as the English of
the mother-country.
Ill
The literary situation which confronted me when I
came to Boston was, then, as native as could well be;
and whatever value I may be able to give a personal
study of it will be from the effect it made upon me as
one strange in everything but sympathy. I will not
pretend that I saw it in its entirety, and I have no hope
of presenting anything like a kinetoscopic impression
of it. What I can do is to give here and there a glimpse
of it ; and I shall wish the reader to keep in mind the
fact that it was in a " state of transition," as everything
is always and everywhere. It was no sooner recog
nizably "native than it ceased to be fully so; and I be
came a witness of it after the change had begun. The
publishing house which so long embodied New England
literature' was already attempting enterprises out of
the line of its traditions, and one of these had brought
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LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Mr. T. B. Aldrich from New York, a few weeks be
fore I arrived upon the scene in that dramatic quality
which I think never impressed any one but Mr. Bowles.
Mr. Aldrich was the editor of Every Saturday when I
came to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly.
We were of nearly the same age, but he had a distinct
and distinguished priority of reputation, insomuch that
in my Western remoteness I had always ranged him
with such elders and betters of mine as Holmes and
Lowell, and never imagined him the blond, slight youth
I found him, with every imaginable charm of contem
poraneity. It is no part of the office which I have in
tended for these slight and sufficiently wandering
glimpses of the past to show any writer in his final
place; and above all I do not presume to assign any
living man his rank or station. But I should be false
to my own grateful sense of beauty in the work of this
poet if I did not at all times recognize his constancy to
an ideal which his name stands for. He is known in
several kinds, but to my thinking he is best in a certain
nobler kind of poetry; a serious sort in which the
thought holds him above the scrupulosities of the art he
loves and honors so much. Sometimes the file slips in
his hold, as the file must and will ; it is but an instru
ment at the best ; but there is no mistouch in the hand
that lays itself upon the reader's heart with the pulse
of the poet's heart quick and true in it. There are son
nets of his, grave, and simple, and lofty, which I think
of with the glow and thrill possible only from very
beautiful poetry, and which impart such an emotion
as we can feel only
" When a great thought strikes along the brain
And flushes all the cheek."
When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose
that in the employ of the kindly house we were both so
120
UTERAEY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
eager to serve, our dignities were about the same; for
if the Atlantic Monthly was a somewhat prouder affair
than an eclectic weekly like Every Saturday, he was
supreme in his place, and I was subordinate in mine.
The house was careful, in the attitude of its senior
partner, not to distinguish between us, and we were
not slow to perceive the tact used in managing us ; we
had our own joke of it; we compared notes to find
whether we were equally used in this thing or that;
and we promptly shared the fun of our discovery with
Fields himself.
We had another impartial friend (no less a friend of
joy in the life which seems to have been pretty nearly
all joy, as I look back upon it) in the partner who be
came afterwards the head of the house, and who fore
cast in his bold enterprises the change from a ^few Eng
land to an American literary situation. In the end
James R. Osgood failed, though all his enterprises suc
ceeded. The anomaly is sad, but it is not infrequent.
They were greater than his powers and his means, and
before they could reach their full fruition, they had
to be enlarged to men of longer purse and longer pa
tience. He was singularly fitted both by instinct and
by education to become a great publisher ; and he early
perceived that if a leading American house were to con
tinue at Boston, it must be hospitable to the talents of
the whole country. He founded his future upon those
generous lines ; but he wanted the qualities as well as the
resources for rearing the superstructure. Changes be
gan to follow each other rapidly after he came into
control of the house. Misfortune reduced the size and
number of its periodicals. The Young Folks was sold
outright, and the North American Review (long before
Air Eice bought it and carried it to Xew York) was
cut down one-half, so that Aldrich said, It looked as if
121
LITEEARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Destiny had sat upon it. His own periodical, Every
Saturday, was first enlarged to a stately quarto and il
lustrated; and then, under stress of the calamities fol
lowing the great Boston fire, it collapsed to its former
size. Then both the Atlantic Monthly and Every Sat
urday were sold away from their old ownership, and
Every Saturday was suppressed altogether, and we two
ceased to be of the same employ. There was some sort
of evening rite (more funereal than festive) the day
after they were sold, and we followed Osgood away
from it, under the lamps. We all knew that it was
his necessity that had caused him to part with the peri
odicals; but he professed that it was his pleasure, and
he said he had not felt so light-hearted since he was a
boy. We asked him, How could he feel gay when he
was no longer paying us our salaries, and how could he
justify it to his conscience? He liked our mocking,
and limped away from us with a rheumatic easing of
his weight from one foot to another: a figure pathetic
now that it has gone the way to dusty death, and dear
to memory through benefactions unalloyed by one un-
kindness.
IV
But when I came to Boston early in 1866, the 'At
lantic Monthly and Harper's then divided our maga
zine world between them ; the North American Review,
in the control of Lowell and Professor Norton, had
entered upon a new life ; Every Saturday was an in
stant success in the charge of Mr. Aldrich, who was by
taste and training one of the best editors; and Our
Young Folks had the field of juvenile periodical litera
ture to itself.
It was under the direction of Miss Lucy Larcom and
of Mr. J. T. Trowbridge, who had come from western
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LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
York, where he was born, and must be noted as
one of the first returners from the setting to the rising
sun. He naturalized himself in Boston in his later
boyhood, and he still breathes Boston air, where he
dwells in the street called Pleasant, on the shore of Spy
Pond, at Arlington, and still weaves the magic web of
his satisfying stories for boys. He merges in their popu
larity the fame of a poet which I do not think will al
ways suffer that eclipse, for his poems show him to
have looked deeply into the heart of common humanity
with a true and tender sense of it.
Miss Larcom scarcely seemed to change from date to
date in the generation that elapsed between the time I
first saw her and the time I saw her last, a year or two
before her death. A goodness looked out of her comely
face, which made me think of the Madonna's in
Titian's " Assumption," and her whole aspect express
ed a mild and friendly spirit which I find it hard to put
in words. She was never of the fine world of litera
ture ; she dwelt where she was born, in that unfashion
able Beverly which is not Beverly Farms, and was of
a simple, sea-faring, God-fearing race, as she has told
in one of the loveliest autobiographies I know, A New
England Girlhood. She was-the author of many poems,
whose number she constantly enlarged, but she was
chiefly, and will be most lastingly, famed for the one
poem, Hannah Binding Shoes, which years before
my days in Boston had made her so widely knowm Sho
never again struck so deep or so true a note; but if one
has lodged such a note in the ear of time, it is enough ;
and if we are to speak of eternity, one might very well
hold up one's head in the fields of asphodel, if one could
say to the great others there, « I wrote Hannah Binding
Shoes/' Her poem is very, very sad, as all who have
read it will remember; but Miss Larcom herself was
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
above everything cheerful, and she had a laugh of mel
low richness which willingly made itself heard. She
was not only of true New England stock, and a Boston
author by right of race, but she came up to that city
every winter from her native town.
By the same right and on the same terms, another
New England poetess, whom I met those first days in
Boston, was a Boston author. When I saw Celia Thax-
ter she was just beginning to make her effect with those
poems and sketches which the sea sings and flashes
through as it sings and flashes around the Isles of
Shoals, her summer home, where her girlhood had been
passed in a freedom as wild as the curlew's. She was
a most beautiful creature, still very young, with a
slender figure, and an exquisite perfection of feature;
she was in presence what her work was: fine, frank,
finished. I do not know whether other witnesses of our
literary history feel that the public has failed to keep
her as fully in mind as her work merited ; but I do not
think there can be any doubt but our literature would
be sensibly the poorer without her work. It is inter
esting to remember how closely she kept to her native
field, and it is wonderful to consider how richly she
made those sea-beaten rocks to blossom. Something
strangely full and bright came to her verse from the
mystical environment of the ocean, like the luxury of
leaf and tint that it gave the narrower flower-plots of her
native isles. Her gift, indeed, could not satisfy itself
with the terms of one art alone, however varied, and
she learned to express in color the thoughts and feel
ings impatient of the pallor of words.
She remains in my memories of that far Boston
a distinct and vivid personality; as the authoress of
Amber Gods, and In a Cellar, and Circum
stance, and those other wild romantic tales, remains
124:
the gentle and somewhat evanescent presence I found
her. Miss Prescott was now Mrs. Spofford, and her
husband was a rising young politician of the day. It
was his duties as member of the General Court that
had brought them up from ISTewburyport to Boston for
that first winter; and I remember that the evening
when we met he was talking of their some time going
to Italy that she might study for imaginative litera
ture certain Italian cities he named. I have long since
ceased to own those cities, but at the moment I felt a
pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I
could; and now I heartily wish she could have ful
filled that purpose if it was a purpose, or realized
that dream if it was only a dream. Perhaps,
however, that sumptuous and glowing fancy of
hers, which had taken the fancy of the young readers
of that day, needed the cold New England background
to bring out all its intensities of tint, all its splendors
of light. Its effects were such as could not last, or
could not be farther evolved ; they were the expression
of youth musing away from its environment and smit
ten with the glories of a world afar and beyond, the
great world, the fine world, the impurpled world of
romantic motives and passions. But for what they
were, I can never think them other than what they ap
peared: the emanations of a rarely gifted and singu
larly poetic mind. I feel better than I can say how
necessarily they were the emanations of a New Eng
land mind, and how to the subtler sense they must im
part the pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities
which are the long result of puritanisrn in the physiog
nomy of New England life.
Their author afterwards gave herself to the i
study of this life in many tales and sketches which
showed an increasing mastery; but they could not have
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
the flush, the surprise, the delight of a young talent
trying itself in a kind native and, so far as I know,
peculiar to it. From time to time I still come upon a
poem of hers which recalls that earlier strain of music,
of color, and I am content to trust it for my abiding
faith in the charm of things I have not read for thirty
years.
V
I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with
no thought of giving a complete prospect of literary
Boston thirty years ago. I am aware that it will seem
sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I would
have the reader always keep in mind the great fames
at Cambridge and at Concord, which formed so large
a part of the celebrity of Boston. I would also like
him to think of it as still a great town, merely, where
every one knew every one else, and whose metropoli
tan liberation from neighborhood was just begun.
Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the
critic Edwin P. Whipple, whose sympathies were in
definitely wider than his traditions. He was a most
generous lover of all that was excellent in literature;
and though I suppose we should call him an old-
fashioned critic now, I suspect it would be with no dis
tinct sense of what is newer fashioned. He was cer
tainly as friendly to what promised well in the young
er men as he was to what was done well in their
ciders; and there was no one writing in his day
whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it might
happen that his foibles would escape Whipple's cen
sure. He wrote strenuously and of course conscien
tiously; his point of view was solely and always that
which enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt
if he had any theory of criticism except to find out
126
what was good in an author and praise it; and he
rather blamed what was ethically bad than what was
aesthetically bad. In this he was strictly of New Eng
land, and he was of New England in a certain general
intelligence, which constantly grew with an interrog
ative habit of mind.
He liked to talk to you of what he had found charac
teristic in your work, to analyze you to yourself; and
the very modesty of the man, which made such a study
impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes
rendered him insensible to the sufferings of his sub
ject. He had a keen perception of humor in others,
but he had very little humor ; he had a love of the beau
tiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes great
er than his sense of it.
I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work,
not recently renewed. Of the presence of the man I
have a vivider remembrance: a slight, short, ecclesi-
asticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth and a
silk hat of strict decorum, and between the two a
square face with square features, intensified in their
regard by a pair of very large glasses, and the promi
nent, myopic eyes staring through them. He was a
type of out-dated New England scholarship in these
aspects, but in the hospitable qualities of his mind and
heart, the sort of man to be kept fondly in the memory
of all who ever knew him.
Out of the vague of that far-off time another face
and figure, as essentially New England as this, and yet
so different, relieve themselves. Charles F. Browne,
whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as far as the
English speech could carry laughter, was a Western
ized Yankee. He added an Ohio way of talking to
the Maine way of thinking, and he so became a literary
product of a rarer and stranger sort than our literature
127
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to
London, with intervals of New York and the lecture
platform, four or five years before I saw him in Bos
ton, shortly after I went there. We had met in Ohio,
and he had personally explained to me the ducatless
well-meaning of Vanity Fair in New York ; but many
men had since shaken the weary hand of Artemus
Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tre-
mont Temple. He did not recognize me, but he gave
me at once a greeting of great impersonal cordiality,
with " How do you do ? When did you come ?" and
other questions that had no concern in them, till I be
gan to dawn upon him through a cloud of other half-
remembered faces. Then he seized my hand and
wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly
demands with an intonation that was now " Why, how
are you, — how are you?" for me alone. It was a bit
of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his im
pending doom: this was already stamped upon his
wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look. His
large, loose mouth was drawn, for all its laughter at
the fact which he owned ; his profile, which burlesqued
an eagle's, was the profile of a drooping eagle ; his lank
length of limb trembled away with him when we part
ed. I did not see him again ; I scarcely heard of him
till I heard of his death, and this sad image remains
with me of the humorist who first gave the world a
taste of the humor which characterizes the whole
American people.
VI
I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in
my relation to the magazine, and early that winter
I met one who remains in my mind above all others
a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity,
128
LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
but he embodied certain social traits which were so
characteristic of literary Boston that it could not be
approached without their recognition. The Muses
have often been acknowledged to be very nice young
persons, but in Boston they were really ladies ; in Bos
ton literature was of good family and good society in
a measure it has never been elsewhere. It might be
said even that reform was of good family in Boston;
and literature and reform equally shared the regard of
Edmund Qurncy, whose race was one of the most aris
tocratic in !New England. I had known him by his
novel of Wensley (it came so near being a first-rate
novel), and by his Life of Josiah Quincy, then a new
book, but still better by his Boston letters to the New
York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the old anti-
slavery days between 1850 and 1860, with other per
sons of distinction in Boston, who did not see the right
so clearly as Quincy did, or who at least let their in
terests darken them to the ugliness of slavery. Their
fault was all the more comical because it was the error
of men otherwise so correct, of characters so stainless,
of natures so upright ; and the Quincy letters got out
of it all the fun there was in it. Quincy himself affect
ed me as the finest patrician type I had ever met. He
was charmingly handsome, with a nose of most fit
aquilinity, smooth-shaven lips, "educated whiskers,"
and perfect glasses; his manner was beautiful, his
voice delightful, when at our first meeting he made me
his reproaches in terms of lovely kindness for having
used in my Venetian Life the Briticism directly i
as soon as. ,
Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any
calling or profession, because when he found himself
in the enjoyment of a moderate income on leaving col
We, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too
129
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
much of a man to be merely that, and he was an aboli
tionist, a journalist, and for conscience' sake a satirist.
Of that political mood of society which he satirized was
an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to
meet in my early days in Boston; and if his great
sweetness and kindness had not instantly won my lik
ing, I should still have been glad of the glimpse of the
older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance
with George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Span
ish literature, the friend and biographer of Prescott,
and a leading figure of the intellectual society of an
epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick
mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street
and Beacon, though sunk now to a variety of business
uses, and lamentably changed in aspect. The interior
was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and
of lettered elegance in the library, where the host re
ceived his guests, which seemed to pervade the whole
house, and which made its appeal to the imagination of
one of them most potently. It seemed to me that to
be master of such circumstance and keeping would be
enough of life in a certain way; and it all lingers in
my memory yet, as if it were one with the gentle cour
tesy which welcomed me.
Among my fellow-guests one night was George S.
Hillard, now a faded reputation, and even then a life
defeated of the high expectation of its youth. I do not
know whether his Six Months in Italy still keeps itself
in print ; but it was a book once very well known ; and
he was perhaps the more gracious to me, as our host
was, because of our common Italian background. He
was of the old Silver-gray Whig society too, and I sup
pose that order of things imparted its tone to what I
felt and saw in that place. The civil war had come
and gone, and that order accepted the result if not with
130
LITEKARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
faith, then with patience. There were two young Eng
lish noblemen there that night, who had been travelling
in the South, and whose stories of the wretched condi
tions they had seen moved our host to some open mis
giving. But the Englishmen had no question j in spito
of all, they defended the accomplished fact, and when
I ventured to say that now at least there could be a
hope of better things, while the old order was only the
perpetuation of despair, he mildly assented, with a
gesture of the hand that waived the point, and a deep
ly sighed, "Perhaps; perhaps."
He was a presence of great dignity, which seemed to
recall the past with a steadfast allegiance, and yet to
relax itself towards the present in the wisdom of the ac
cumulated years. His whole life had been passed in
devotion to polite literature and in the society of the
polite world ; and he was a type of scholar such as only
the circumstances of Boston could form. Those cir
cumstances could alone form such another type
as Quincy; and I wish I could have felt then as I do
now the advantage of meeting them so contemporane
ously.
VII
The historian of Spanish literature was an old man
nearer eighty than seventy when I saw him, and I re
call of him personally his dark tint, and the scholarly
refinement, of his clean-shaven face, which seemed to me
rather English than American in character. He was
o
quite exterior to the Atlantic group of writers, and had
no interest in me as one of it. Literary Boston of that
day was not a solidarity, as I soon perceived; and I
understood that it was only in my quality of stranger
that I saw the different phases of it. I should not be
just to a vivid phase if I failed to speak of Mrs. Julia
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Ward Howe and the impulse of reform which she per
sonified. I did not sympathize with this then so much
as I do now, but I could appreciate it on the intellectual
side. Once, many years later, I heard Mrs. Howe
speak in public, and it seemed to mo that she made one
of the best speeches I had ever heard. It gave me for
the first time a notion of what women might do in that
sort if they entered public life; but when we met in
those earlier days I was interested in her as perhaps
our chief poetess. I believe she did not care much to
speak of literature; she was alert for other meanings
in life, and I remember how she once brought to book
a youthful matron who had perhaps unduly lamented
the hardships of housekeeping, with the sharp demand,
" Child, where is your religion?" After the many years
of an acquaintance which had not nearly so many meet
ings as years, it was pleasant to find her, at the latest,
as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as eager
to aid Stepiiiak as John Brown. In her beautiful old
age she survives a certain literary impulse of Boston,
but a still higher impulse of Boston she will not sur
vive, for that will last while the city endures.
VIII
The Cambridge men were curiously apart from others
that formed the great New England group, and with
whom in my earlier ignorance I had always fancied
them mingling. Now and then I met Doctor Holmes
at Longfellow's table, but not oftener than now and
then, and I never saw Emerson in Cambridge at all
except at Longfellow's funeral. In my first years on
the Atlantic I sometimes saw him, when he would ad
dress me some grave, rather retrorsive civilities, after
I had been newly introduced to him, as I had always
132
to be on these occasions. I formed the belief that he
did not care for me, either in my being or doing, and I
am far from blaming him for that : on such points there
might easily be two opinions, and I was myself often of
the mind I imagined in him.
If Emerson forgot me, it was perhaps because I was
not of those qualities of things which even then, it was
said, he could remember so much better than things
themselves. In his later years I sometimes saw him
in the Boston streets with his beautiful face dreamily
set, as he moved like one to whose vision
" Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn,
Vast images in glimmering dawn,
Half shown, are broken and withdrawn."
It is known how before the end the eclipse became
total and from moment to moment the record inscribed
upon his mind was erased. Some years before he died
I sat between him and Mrs. Eose Terry Cooke, at an
Atlantic Breakfast where it was part of my editorial
function to preside. When he was not asking me who
she was, I could hear him asking her who I was. His
great soul worked so independently of memory as we con
ceive it and so powerfully and essentially, that one could
not help wondering if, after all, our personal continu
ity our identity hereafter, was necessarily trammelc
up with our enduring knowledge of what happens here
His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event, and
yet his character, his personality, his identity f
sistcci • i
I do not know whether the things that we prmte
for Emerson after his memory began to fail so utt,
Were the work of earlier years or not, but I kno,
thcv were of his best. There were certain poems
could not have been more elcctly, more exquisitely his,
133
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
or fashioned with a keener and juster self-criticism.
His vision transcended his time so far that some who
have tired themselves out in trying to catch up with
him have now begun to say that he was no seer at all ;
but I doubt if these form the last court of appeal in
his case. In manner, he was very gentle, like all those
great New England men, but he was cold, like many
of them, to the new-comer, or to the old-comer who
came newly. As I have elsewhere recorded, I once
heard him speak critically of Hawthorne, and once he
expressed his surprise at the late flowering brilliancy
of Holmes's gift in the Autocrat papers after all
his friends supposed it had borne its best fruit. But I
recall no mention of Longfellow, or Lowell, or Whittier
from him. At a dinner where the talk glanced upon
Walt Whitman he turned to me as perhaps representing
the interest posterity might take in the matter, and re
ferred to Whitman's public use of his privately written
praise as something altogether unexpected. He did not
disown it or withdraw it, but seemed to feel (not in
dignantly) that there had been an abuse of it.
IX
The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields's room
at the publishing office, where I had come upon some
editorial errand to my chief. He introduced me to
the poet: a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut,
with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid
black eyes. It was just after his poem, Snow Bound,
had made its great success, in the modest fashion of
those days, and had sold not two hundred thousand but
twenty thousand, and I tried to make him my compli
ment. I contrived to say that I could not tell him how
much I liked it; and he received the inadequate ex-
134
LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
pression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion
as he would have met something more explicit and
abundant. If he had judged fit to take my contract off
my hands in any way, I think he would have been less
able to do so than any of his New England contempo
raries. In him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm
was bound by the frosty Puritanic air, and he was doubly
cold to the touch of the stranger, though he would thaw
out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. I my
self never got so far with him as to experience this geni
ality, though afterwards we became such friends as an
old man and a young man could be who rarely met.
Our better acquaintance began with some talk, at a sec
ond meeting, about Bayard Taylor's Story of Kennett,
which had then lately appeared, and which he praised
for its fidelity to Quaker character in its less amiable
aspects. N"o doubt I had made much of my own
Quaker descent (which I felt was one of the few things
I had to be proud of), and he therefore spoke the more
frankly of those traits of brutality into which the primi
tive sincerity of the sect sometimes degenerated. Ho
thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously
guarded to keep it from becoming rude-speaking, and
he matched with stories of his own some things I had
heard my father tell of Friends in the backwoods who'
were Foes to good manners.
Whittier was one of the most generous of men tow
ards the work of others, especially the work of a new
man, and if I did anything that he liked, I could count
upon him for cordial recognition. In the quiet of his
country home at Danvers he apparently read all the
magazines, and kept himself fully abreast of the liter
ary movement, but I doubt if he so fully appreciated
the importance of the social movement. Like some
others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to irnag-
135
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
ine that mankind had won itself a clear field by destroy
ing chattel slavery, and ho had no sympathy with those
who think that the man who may any moment be out of
work is industrially a slave. This is not strange; so
few men last over from one reform to another that the
wonder is that any should, not that one should not.
Whittier was prophet for one great need of the divine to
man, and he spoke his message with a fervor that at times
was like the trembling of a flame, or the quivering of
midsummer sunshine. It was hard to associate with the
man as one saw him, still, shy, stiff, the passion of his
verse. This imbued not only his anti-slavery utter
ances, but equally his ballads of the old witch and
Quaker persecution, and flashed a far light into the
dimness where his interrogations of Mystery pierced.
Whatever doubt there can be of the fate of other New
England poets in the great and final account, it seems
to me that certain of these pieces make his place secure.
There is great inequality in his work, and I felt this
so strongly that when I came to have full charge of the
Magazine, I ventured once to distinguish. He sent me
a poem, and I had the temerity to return it, and bog him
for something else. He magnanimously refrained from
all show of offence, and after a while, when he had print
ed the poem elsewhere, he gave me another. By this time,
I perceived that I had been wrong, not as to the poem
returned, but as to my function regarding him and such
as he. I had made my reflections, and never again did
I venture to pass upon what contributors of his quality
sent me. I took it and printed it, and praised the gods ;
,and even now I think that with such men it was not
my duty to play the censor in the periodical which they
had made what it was. They had set it in authority
over American literature, and it was not for me to put
myself in authority over them. Their fame was in
136
LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
their own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it
against them.
After that experience I not only practised an eager
acquiescence in their wish to reach the public through
the Atlantic, but I used all the delicacy I was master of
in bowing the way to them. Sometimes my utmost did
not avail, or more strictly speaking it did not avail in
one instance with Emerson. He had given me upon
much entreaty a poem which was one of his greatest
and best, but the proof-reader found a nominative
at odds with its verb. We had some trouble in recon
ciling them, and some other delays, and meanwhile
Doctor Holmes offered me a poem for the same num
ber. I now doubted whether I should get Emerson's
poem back in time for it, but unluckily the proof did
come back in time, and then I had to choose between
my poets, or acquaint them with the state of the case,
and let them choose \vhat I should do. I really felt
that Doctor Holmes had the right to precedence, since
Emerson had withheld his proof so long that I could not
count upon it; but I wrote to Emerson, and asked (as
nearly as I can remember) whether he would consent
to let me put his poem over to the next number, or
would prefer to have it appear in the same number
with Doctor Holmes's ; the subjects were cognate, and I
had my misgivings. He wrote me back to " return the
proofs and break up the forms." I could not go to this
iconoclastic extreme with the electrotypes of the maga
zine, but I could return the proofs. I did so, feeling
that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that
there could be such ire in heavenly minds.
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge,
but Whittier never; and I have a feeling that poet as
Cambridge felt him to be, she had her reservations con
cerning him. I cannot put these into words which
would not oversay them, but they were akin to those
she might have refined upon in regard to Mrs. Stowe.
Neither of these great writers would have appeared to
Cambridge of the last literary quality ; their fame was
with a world too vast to be the test that her own
"One entire and perfect crysolite"
would have formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived
at the clear splendor of his later work without some
earlier turbidity; he was still from time to time ca
pable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for
the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin her syntax was such
a snare to her that it sometimes needed the combined
skill of all the proof-readers and the assistant editor
to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written
into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction
of solecisms, in transposition of phrases, the text was
largely rewritten on the margin of her proofs. The
soul of her art was present, but the form was so often
absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would
have been hard to say whose cut the garment was of
in many places. In fact, the proof-reading of the At
lantic Monthly was something almost fearfully scrupu
lous and perfect. The proofs were first read by the
under proof-reader in the printing-office; then the
head reader passed them to me perfectly clean as to
typography, with his own abundant and most intelli
gent comments on the literature ; and then I read them,
isa
LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
making what changes I chose, and verifying every quo
tation, every date, every geographical and biographical
name, every foreign word to the last accent, every tech
nical and scientific term. Where it was possible or
at all desirable the proof was next submitted to the
author. When it came back to me, I revised it, accept
ing or rejecting the author's judgment according as
he was entitled by his ability and knowledge or not to
have them. The proof now went to the printers for
correction; they sent it again to the head reader, who
carefully revised it and returned it again to me. I read
it a second time, and it was again corrected. After this
it was revised in the office and sent to the stereotyper,
from whom it came to the head reader for a last re
vision in the plates.
It would not do to say how many of the first Ameri
can writers owed their correctness in print to the zeal
of our proof-reading, but I may say that there were
very few who did not owe something. The wisest
and ablest were the most patient and grateful, like
Mrs. Stowe, under correction; it was only the begin
ners and the more ignorant who were angry; and al
most always the proof-reading editor had his way on
disputed points. I look back now, with respectful
amazement at my proficiency in detecting the errors
of the great as well as the little. I was able to dis
cover mistakes even in the classical quotations of the
deeply lettered Simmer, and I remember, in the ear
liest years of my service on the Atlantic, waiting in
this statesman's study amidst the prints and engrav
ings that attested his personal resemblance to Edmund
Burke, with his proofs in my hand and my heart in my
mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity. I forget
how he received them; but he was not a very gracioua
person.
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into
age the inalienable charm of a woman who must have
been very charming earlier. I met her only at the
Fieldses' in Boston, where one night I witnessed a
controversy between her and Doctor Holmes concerning
homo3Opathy and allopathy which lasted well through
dinner. After this lapse of time, I cannot tell how
the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with
which Mrs. Stowe inspired me. There was something
very simple, very motherly in her, and something di
vinely sincere. She was quite the person to take au
grand serienx the monstrous imaginations of Lady
Byron's jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to
make public report of them when she conceived that
the time had come to do so.
XI
In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in
some others a differentiation of the New England type
which was not less characteristic. He, like so many
other Boston men of letters, was of patrician family,
and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons
to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suf
fering in which he wrought at what is, I suppose, our
greatest history. He wrought at it piecemeal, and
sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head
aches which tormented him, and the disorder of the
heart which threatened his life, allowed him a brief
respite for the task which was dear to him. He must
have been more than a quarter of a century in com
pleting it, and in this time, as he once told me, it had
given him a day-laborer's wages ; but of course money
was the least return he wished from it. I read the ir
regularly successive volumes of The Jesuits in North
140
LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
'America, The Old Regime in Canada, the Wolfe and
Montcalm,and the others that went to make up the whole
history with a sufficiently noisy enthusiasm, and our
acquaintance began by his expressing his gratification
with the praises of them that I had put in print. We
entered into relations as contributor and editor, and I
know that he was pleased with my eagerness to get as
many detachable chapters from the book in hand as
he could give me for the magazine, but he was of too
fine a politeness to make this the occasion of his first
coming to see me. He had walked out to Cambridge,
where I then lived, in pursuance of a regimen which,
I believe, finally built up his health; that it was un
sparing, I can testify from my own share in one of his
constitutionals in Boston, many years later.
His experience in laying the groundwork for his
history, and his researches in making it thorough, were
such as to have liberated him to the knowledge of other
manners and ideals, but he remained strictly a Bosto-
nian, and as immutably of the Boston social and literary
faith as any I knew in that capital of accomplished
facts. He had lived like an Indian among the wild
Western tribes; he consorted with the Canadian archae
ologists in their mousings among the colonial archives
of their fallen state ; every year he went to Quebec or
Paris to study the history of New France in the origi
nal documents; European society was open to him
everywhere ; but he had those limitations which I near
ly always found in the Boston men. I remember his
talking to me of The Rise of Silas Lapliam, in a some
what troubled and uncertain strain, and interpreting
his rise as the achievement of social recognition, with
out much or at all liking it or me for it. I did not
think it my part to point out that I had supposed the
rise to be a moral one ; and later I fell under his coudeui-
141
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
nation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had
been guilty of against a well-known ideal in fiction.
These in fact constituted lese-majesty of romanticism,
which seemed to be disproportionately dear to a man
who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of hu
man nature as I was in mine. His displeasures pass
ed, however, and my last meeting with our greatest
historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed friendli
ness. He came to me during my final year in Boston
for nothing apparently but to tell me of his liking for
a book of mine describing boy-life in Southern Ohio
a half-century ago. He wished to talk about many
points of this, which he found the same as his own boy-
life in the neighborhood of Boston ; and we could agree
that the life of the Anglo-Saxon boy was pretty much
the same everywhere. He had helped himself into my
apartment with a crutch, but I do not remember how
he had fallen lame. It was the end of his long walks,
I believe, and not long afterwards I had the grief to
read of his death. I noticed that perhaps through his
enforced quiet, he had put on weight; his fine face was
full ; whereas when I first knew him he was almost
delicately thin of figure and feature. He was always
of a distinguished presence, and his face had a great
distinction.
It had not the appealing charm I found in
the face of James Parton, another historian I knew
earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how much
his books, once so worthily popular, are now known,
but I have an abiding sense of their excellence. I
have not read the Life of Voltaire, which was the last,
but all the rest, from the first, I have read, and if there
are better American biographies than those of Frank
lin or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them.
The Greeley and the Burr were younger books, and so
142
LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
was the Jackson, and they were not nearly so good;
but to all the author had imparted the valuable human
ity in which he abounded. He was never of the fine
world of literature, the world that sniffs and sneers,
and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But he was a
true artist, and English born as he was, he divined
American character as few Americans have done. He
was a man of eminent courage, and in the days when to
be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he had the
heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know.
He outlived the condemnation that this brought, and
I think that no man ever came near him without in
some measure loving him. To me he was of a most
winning personality, which his strong, gentle face ex
pressed, and a cast in the eye \vhich he could not bring
to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis, endeared. I
never met him without wishing more of his company,
for he seldom failed to say something to whatever was
most humane and most modern in me. Our last meet
ing was at Newburyport, whither he had long before
removed from New York, and where in the serene at
mosphere of the ancient Puritan town he found leisure
and inspiration for his work. He was not then en
gaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and
broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old
warmth glowed in him, and made a summer amidst
the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air without.
A new light had then lately come into my life, by
which I saw all things that did not somehow tell for
human brotherhood dwarfish and ugly, and he listened,
as I imagined, to what I had to say with the tolerant
sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking
those things, and views with a certain amusement the
zeal of the fresh discoverer.
There was yet another historian in Boston, whose
'143
acquaintance I made later than either Parkman's or
Parton's, and whose very recent death leaves me with
the grief of a friend. No one, indeed, could meet John
Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or with
out finding a friend in him. He had his likes and his
dislikes, but he could have had no enmities except for evil
and meanness. I never knew a man of higher soul, of
sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of
character. It cannot wound him now to speak of the
cruel deformity which came upon him in his boyhood,
and haunted all his after days with suffering. His
gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of
the hunchback, but nothing else in him confessed a
sense of his affliction, and the resolute activity of his
mind denied it in every way. He was, as is well known,
a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making
his studies of military history, and winning recognition
for almost unique insight and thoroughness in that direc
tion, though I believe that when he came to embody the
results in those extraordinary volumes recording the
battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in
some measure. He knew these battles more accurately
than the generals who fought them, and he was of a like
proficiency in the European wars from the time of
Napoleon down to our own time. I have heard a story,
which I cannot vouch for, that when foreknowledge of
his affliction, at the outbreak of our civil war, forbade
him to be a soldier, he became a student of soldiership,
and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant
spirit. But whether this was true or not, it is certain
that he pursued the study with a devotion which never
blinded him to the atrocity of war. Some wars he could
excuse and even justify, but for any war that seemed
wanton or aggressive, he had only abhorrence.
The last summer of a score that I had known him,
144
LITERAEY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT
we sat on the veranda of his cottage at York Ilarhor,
and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he talked of
the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest
for the inquiry which I always found in him, though
he was then feeling the approaches of the malady which
was so soon to end all groping in these shadows for
him. He must have faced the fact with the same
courage and the same trust with which he faced all facts.
From the first I found him a deeply religious man, not
only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the more mystical
meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept
his youth to the last. Every one who knew him, knows
how young he was in heart, and how he liked to have
those that were young in years about him. He wished
to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at
York, full of young men and young girls, whose joy of
life he made his own, and whose society he preferred
to his contemporaries'. One could not blame him for
that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it
would be a false notion of him to suppose that his sym
pathies were solely or chiefly with the happy. In
every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and good. The
word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and
associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and
whitened to its primitive significance, I should say
he was one of the most perfect gentlemen I ever knew.
part ffiftb
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
ELSEWHERE we literary folk are apt to be such
a common lot, with tendencies here and there to
be a shabby lot ; we arrive from all sorts of unexpected
holes and corners of the earth, remote, obscure ; and at
the best we do so often come up out of the ground ; but
at Boston we were of ascertained and noted origin, and
good part of us dropped from the skies. Instead of
holding horses before the doors of theatres ; or capping
verses at the plough-tail ; or tramping over Europe with
nothing but a flute in the pocket ; or walking up to the
metropolis with no luggage but the MS. of a tragedy;
or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges ;
or serving as apothecaries' 'prentices — we were good
society from the beginning. I think this was none the
worse for us, and it was vastly the better for good so
ciety.
I
Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and
often of so high a lineage, that to be a poet was not only
to be good society, but almost to be good family. If
one names over the men who gave Boston her suprem
acy in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time
of the old Puritanic seed-time which was her Augustan
age, one names the people who were and who had been
socially first in the city ever since the self -exile of the
146
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
Tories at the time of the Revolution. To say Prescott,
Motley, Parkman, Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana,
Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician, in the truest
and often the best sense, if not the largest. Boston was
small, but these were of her first citizens, and their
primacy, in its \vay, was of the same quality as that,
say, of the chief families of Venice. But these names
can never have the effect for the stranger that they had
for one to the manner born. I say had, for I doubt
whether in Boston they still mean all that they once
meant, and that their equivalents meant in science, in
law, in politics. The most famous, if not the greatest
of all the literary men of Boston, I have not mentioned
with them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though
by his sympathies and relations he became of it; and I
have not mentioned Oliver Wendell Holmes, because
I think his name would come first into the reader's
thought with the suggestion of social quality in the
humanities.
Holmes was of the Brahminical caste which his hu
morous recognition invited from its subjectivity in
the New England consciousness into the light where
all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he
was allied to the patriciate of Boston by the most
intimate ties of life. For a long time, for the whole
first period of his work, he stood for that alone, its
tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he came
to stand in his second period, for vastly, for infinitely
more, and to make friends with the whole race, as few
men have ever done, it was always, I think, with a
secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of longing, and
an eve askance. He was himself perfectly aware of this
at times, and would mark Ins several misgivings
a humorous sense of the situation. He was essentially
too kind to be of a narrow world, too human to be fin-
ii 147
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
ally of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest
gentility. But such limitations as he had were in the
direction I have hinted, or perhaps more than hinted;
and I am by no means ready to make a mock of them,
as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he
has himself suggested. To value aright the affection
which the old Bostonian had for Boston one must con
ceive of something like the patriotism of men in the
times when a man's city was a man's country, some
thing Athenian, something Florentine. The war that
nationalized us liberated this love to the whole country,
but its first tenderness remained still for Boston, and
I suppose a Bostonian still thinks of himself first as a
Bostonian and then as an American, in a way that no
New-Yorker could deal with himself. The rich his
torical background dignifies and ennobles the intense
public spirit of the place, and gives it a kind of per
sonality.
II
In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bos-
tonians who had given the city her primacy in letters,
but when I first knew him there was no apparent ground
for questioning it. I do not mean now the time when
I visited New England, but when I came to live near
Boston, and to begin the many happy years which I
spent in her fine, intellectual air. I found time to run
in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my
place on the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in
this brief moment with him he brought me to book
about some vaunting paragraph in the Nation claiming
the literary primacy for New York. He asked me if I
knew who wrote it, and I was obliged to own that I had
written it myself, when with the kindness he always
showed me he protested against my position. To tell
148.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
the truth, I do not think now I had any very good rea
sons for it, and I certainly could urge none that would
stand against his. I could only fall back upon the
saving clause that this primacy was claimed mainly if
not wholly for New York in the future. He was will
ing to leave me the connotations of prophecy, but I
think he did even this out of politeness rather than con
viction, and I believe he had always a sensitiveness
where Boston was concerned, which could not seem un-
DR. HOLMES' HANDWRITING
generous to any generous mind. Whatever lingering
doubt of me he may have had, with reference to Bos
ton, seemed to satisfy itself when several years after
wards he happened to speak of a certain character in an
early novel of mine, who was not quite the kind of .
tonian one could wish to be. The thing came up m
talk with another person, who had referred to my J
tonian, and the doctor had apparently made his
acquaintance in the book, and not liked hum
derstood, of course," he said, « that he was a Boston^
not the Bostonian," and I could truthfully answer that
this was by all means my own understanding too.
149
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
His fondness for his city, which no one could appre
ciate better than myself, I hope, often found expression
in a burlesque excess in his writings, and in his talk
perhaps oftener still. Hard upon my return from
Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on
Charles Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while
I was there a young man came in for the doctor's help
as a physician, though he looked so very well, and was
so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts
whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him
as the Autocrat. The doctor took him upon his word,
however, and said he had been so long out of practice
that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him
the address of another physician, somewhere near Wash
ington Street. " And if you don't know where Wash-
irigton Street is," he said, with a gay burst at a certain
vagueness which had come into the young man's face,
" you don't know anything."
We had been talking of Venice, and what life was
like there, and he made me tell him in some detail. He
was especially interested in what I had to say of the
minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries,
the small coins, and the small values adapted to their
purchase, the intensely retail character, in fact, of
household provisioning ; and I could see how he pleased
himself in formulating the theory that the higher a
civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands
and supplies. The ideal, he said, was a civilization in
which you could buy two cents' worth of beef, and a di
vergence from this standard was towards barbarism.
The secret of the man who is universally interesting
is that he is universally interested, and this was, above
all, the secret of the charm that Doctor Holmes hadjfor
every one. No doubt he knew it, for what that most
alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely
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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
worth knowing. This knowledge was one of his chief
pleasures, I fancy; he rejoiced in the consciousness
which is one of the highest attributes of the highly or
ganized man, and he did not care for the consequences
in your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him
aright. I remember the delight Henry James, the
father of the novelist, had in reporting to me the frank
ness of the doctor, when he had said to him, " Holmes,
you are intellectually the most alive man I ever knew."
" I am, I am," said the doctor. " From the crown of
my head to the sole of my foot, I'm alive, I'm alive !"
Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish
he had in recognizing the fact. He could not be with
you a moment without shedding upon you the light of
his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and he shone equally
upon the rich and poor in mind. His gayety of heart
could not withhold itself from any chance of response,
but he did wish always to be fully understood, and to
be liked by those he liked. He gave his liking cau
tiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies left
him without the reserves of colder natures, and he had
to make up for these with careful circumspection. He
wished to know the character of the person who made
overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware that
his friendship lay close to it ; he wanted to be sure that
he was a nice person, and though I think he preferred
social quality in his fellow-man, he did not refuse him
self to those who had merely a sweet and wholesome hu
manity. He did not like anything that tasted or smelt
of Bohemianism in the personnel of literature, but ho
did not mind the scent of the new-ploughed earth, or
even of the barn-yard. I recall his telling me once that
after two younger brothers-in-lettcrs had called upon
him in the odor of an habitual beerincss and smokiness,
he opened the window; and the very last time I saw
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
him he remembered at eighty-five the offence h© had
found on his first visit to New York, when a metropol
itan poet had asked him to lunch in a basement restau
rant.
Ill
He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the lit
tle apartment we had in Boston when we came there in
1866, and he made this call upon us in due form,
bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the
recognition socially. We were then incredibly young,
much younger than I find people ever are nowadays,
and in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the last
exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have the
Autocrat come to see us ; and I believe he was not dis
pleased to perceive this; he liked to know that you felt
his quality in every way. That first winter, however,
I did not see him often, and in the spring we went to
live in Cambridge, and thereafter I met him chiefly at
Longfellow's, or when I came in to dine at the Fieldses',
in Boston. It was at certain meetings of the Dante
Club, when Longfellow read aloud his translation for
criticism, and there was supper later, that one saw the
doctor; and his voice was heard at the supper rather
than at the criticism, for he was no Italianate. He al
ways seemed to like a certain turn of the talk toward the
mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm ground
of fact this side of the shadows ; when it came to going
over among them, and laying hold of them with the
hand of faith, as if they were substance, he was not of
the excursion. It is well known how fervent, I cannot
say devout, a spiritualist Longfellow's brother-in-law,
Appleton, was; and when he was at the table too, it
took all the poet's delicate skill to keep him and the
Autocrat from involving themselves in a cataclysmal
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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
controversy upon the matter of manifestations. With
Doctor Holmes the inquiry was inquiry, to the last, I
believe, and the burden of proof was left to the ghosts
and their friends. His attitude was strictly scientific;
he denied nothing, but he expected the supernatural to
be at least as convincing as the natural.
There was a time in his history when the popular
ignorance classed him with those who were once rudely
called infidels ; but the world has since gone so fast and
so far that the mind he was of concerning religious be
lief would now be thought religious by a good half of
the religious world. It is true that he had and always
kept a grudge against the ancestral Calvinism which
afflicted his youth; and he was through all rises and
lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the
honest belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or
spoke otherwise than most tolerantly, most tenderly.
As often as he spoke of religion, and his talk tended to
it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from
him, far less a scoff or sneer at religion ; and I am cer
tain that this was not merely because he would have
thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he would have
thought it bad taste ; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to
be counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have
been profoundly grieved if he could have known how
widely this false notion of him once prevailed. It can
do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets
of the publishing house the fact that a supposed in
fidelity in the tone of his story The Guardian Angel
cost the Atlantic Monthly many subscribers. Now
the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly
agnostic, I fancy; and long before his death the author
had outlived the error concerning him.
It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and
it would not be too harsh to say that it was the poorest.
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
His novels all belonged to an order of romance which
was as distinctly his own as the form of dramatized
essay, which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did
not think poorly of them, he certainly did not think too
proudly, and I heard him quote with relish the phrase
of a lady who had spoken of them to him as his " medi
cated novels." That, indeed, was perhaps what they
were; a faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung
to their pages; their magic was scientific. He knew
this better than any one else, of course, and if any one
had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded
it. But what he did mind was the persistent misin
terpretation of his intention in certain quarters where
he thought he had the right to respectful criticism in
stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the suc
cessive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that
he felt the persecution keenly. Perhaps he thought
that he had already reached that time in his literary
life when he was a fact rather than a question, and
when reasons and not feelings must have to do with his
acceptance or rejection. But he had to live many
years yet before lie reached this state. When he did
reach it, happily a good while before his death, I do not
believe any man ever enjoyed the like condition more.
He loved to feel himself out of the fight, with much
work before him still, but with nothing that could pro
voke ill-will in his activities. He loved at all times to
take himself objectively, if I may so express my sense
of a mental attitude that misled many. As I have said
before, he was universally interested, and he studied
the universe from himself. I do not know how one
is to study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no
existence ; but with all his subtlety and depth he was of
a make so simple, of a spirit so naive, that he could not
practise the feints some use to conceal that interest in
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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
self which, after all, every one knows is only concealed.
He frankly and joyously made himself the starting-
point in all his inquest of the hearts and minds of other
men, but so far from singling himself out in this, and
standing apart in it, there never was any one who was
more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being in the things
of the soul.
IV
In the things of the world, he had fences, and look
ed at some people through palings and even over the
broken bottles on the tops of walls ; and I think he was
the loser by this, as well as they. But then I think all
fences are bad, and that God has made enough differ
ences bet ween men ; we need not trouble ourselves to mul
tiply them. Even behind his fences, however, Holmes
had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do not believe
any one came into personal relations with him who did
not experience this kindness. In that long and de
lightful talk I had with him on my return from Ven
ice (I can praise the talk because it was mainly his),
we spoke of the status of domestics in the Old World,
and how fraternal the relation of high and low was in
Italy, while in England, between master and man, it
seemed without acknowledgment of their common hu
manity. " Yes," he said, " I always felt as if English
servants expected to be trampled on ; but I can't do that.
If they want to be trampled on, they must get some
one else." He thought that our American way was in
finitely better ; and I believe that in spite of the fences
there was always an instinctive impulse with him to
get upon common ground with his fellow-man. I used
to notice in the neighborhood cabman who served our
block on Beacon Street a sort of affectionate reverence
for the Autocrat, which could have come from nothing
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LITERAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
but the kindly terms between them ; if you went to him
when he was engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you
so with a sort of implication in his manner that the
thought of anything else for the time was profanation.
The good fellow who took him his drives about the
Beverly and Manchester shores seemed to be quite in
the joke of the doctor's humor, and within the bounds
of his personal modesty and his functional dignity per
mitted himself a smile at the doctor's sallies, when you
stood talking with him, or listening to him at the car
riage-side.
The civic and social circumstance that a man values
himself on is commonly no part of his value, and cer
tainly no part of his greatness. Rather, it is the very
thing that limits him, and I think that Doctor Holmes
appeared in the full measure of his generous person
ality to those who did not and could not appreciate his
circumstance, and not to those who formed it, and who
from life-long association were* so. dear and comfortable
to him. Those who best knew how great a man he was
were those who came from far to pay him their duty,
or to thank him for some help they had got from his
books, or to ask his counsel or seek his sympathy. With
all such he was most winningly tender, most intelli
gently patient. I suppose no great author was ever
more visited by letter and in person than he, or kept
a faithfuler conscience for his guests. With those
who appeared to him in the flesh he used a miraculous
tact, and I fancy in his treatment of all the physician
native in him bore a characteristic part. ISTo one
seemed to be denied access to him, but it was after a
moment of preparation that one was admitted, and
any one who was at all sensitive must have felt from
the first moment in his presence that there could be no
trespassing in point of time. If now and then some
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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
insensitive began to trespass, there was a sliding-scale
of dismissal that never failed of its work, and that real
ly saved the author from the effect of intrusion. He
was not bored because he would not be.
I transfer at random the impressions of many years
to my page, and I shall not try to observe a chron
ological order in these memories. Vivid among them
is that of a visit which I paid him with Osgood the
publisher, then newly the owner of the Atlantic Month
ly, when I had newly become the sole editor. We
wished to signalize our accession to the control of the
magazine by a stroke that should tell most in the public
eye, and we thought of asking Doctor Holmes to do
something again in the manner of the Autocrat and the
Professor at the Breakfast Table. Some letters had
passed between him and the management concerning
our wish, and then Osgood thought that it would be
right and fit for us to go to him in person. He pro
posed the visit, and Doctor Holmes received us with
a mind in which he had evidently formulated all his
thoughts upon the matter. His main question was
whether at his age of sixty years a man was justified
in seeking to recall a public of the past, or to create
a new public in the present. He seemed to have look
ed the ground over not only with a personal interest in
the question, but with a keen scientific zest for it as
something which it was delightful to consider in its
generic relations; and I fancy that the pleasure of
this inquiry more than consoled him for such pangs
of misgiving as he must have had in the personal ques
tion. As commonly happens in the solution of such
problems, it was not solved ; he was very willing to take
our minds upon it, and to incur the risk, if we thought
it well and were willing to share it.
We came away rejoicing, and the new series began
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
with the new year following. It was by no means the
popular success that we had hoped; not because the
author had not a thousand new things to say, or
failed to say them with the gust and freshness of his
immortal youth, but because it was not well to disturb
a form associated in the public mind with an achieve
ment which had become classic. It is of the Autocrat
of the Breakfast Table that people think, when they
think of the peculiar species of dramatic essay which
the author invented, and they think also of the Pro
fessor at the Breakfast Table, because he followed so
soon ; but the Poet at the Breakfast Table came so long
after that his advent alienated rather than conciliated
liking. Very likely, if the Poet had come first he
would have had no second place in the affections of his
readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter ; and
at least one of the poems which graced each instalment
was one of the finest and greatest that Doctor Holmes
ever wrote. I mean " Homesick in Heaven," which
seems to me not only what I have said, but one of the
most important, the most profoundly pathetic in the
language. Indeed, I do not know any other that in
the same direction goes so far with suggestion so pene
trating.
The other poems were mainly of a cast which did
not win; the metaphysics in them were too much for
the human interest, and again there rose a foolish
clamor of the creeds against him on account of them.
The great talent, the beautiful and graceful fancy, the
eager imagination of the Autocrat could not avail
in this third attempt, and I suppose the Poet at the
Breakfast Table must be confessed as near a failure
as Doctor Holmes could come. It certainly was so in
the magazine which the brilliant success of the first
had availed to establish in the high place the periodical
158
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
must always hold in the history of American litera
ture. Lowell was never tired of saying, when he re
curred to the first days of his editorship, that the maga
zine could never have gone at all without the Auto
crat papers. He was proud of having insisted upon
Holmes's doing something for the new venture, and he
was fond of recalling the author's misgivings concern
ing his contributions, which later repeated themselves
with too much reason, though not with the reason that
was in his own mind.
He lived twenty-five years after that self-question
at sixty, and after eighty he continued to prove that
threescore was not the limit of a man's intellectual
activity or literary charm. During all that time the
work he did in mere quantity was the work that a man
in the prime of life might well have been vain of doing,
and it was of a quality not less surprising. If I ask
ed him with any sort of fair notice I could rely upon
him always for something for the January number,
and throughout the year I could count upon him for
those occasional pieces in which he so easily excelled
all former writers of occasional verse, and which he
liked to keep from the newspapers for the magazine.
He had a pride in his promptness with copy, and you
could always trust his promise. The printer's toe
never galled the author's kibe in his case ; he wished to
have an early proof, which he corrected fastidiously,
but not overmuch, and he did not keep it long. Ho
had really done all his work in the manuscript, which
came print-perfect and beautifully clear from his pen,
in that flowing, graceful hand which to the last kept a
suggestion of the pleasure he must have had in it. Like
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all wise contributors, he was not only patient, but very
glad of all the queries and challenges that proof-reader
and editor could accumulate on the margin of his
proofs, and when they were both altogether wrong he
was still grateful. In one of his poems there was
some Latin-Quarter French, which our collective pur
ism questioned, and I remember how tender of us he
was in maintaining that in his Parisian time, at least,
some ladies beyond the Seine said " Eh, b'en," instead
of " Eh, bien." He knew that we must be always on
the lookout for such little matters, and he would not
wound our ignorance.
I do not think any one enjoyed praise more than he.
Of course he would not provoke it, but if it came of
itself, he would not deny himself the pleasure, as long
as a relish of it remained. He used humorously to
recognize his delight in it, and to say of the lecture
audiences which in earlier times hesitated applause,
" Why don't they give me three times three ? I can
stand it!" He himself gave in the generous fulness
he desired. He did not praise foolishly or dishonest
ly, though he would spare an open dislike ; but when a
thing pleased him he knew how to say so cordially and
skilfully, so that it might help as well as delight. I
suppose no great author has tried more sincerely and
faithfully to befriend the beginner than he; and from
time to time he would commend something to me that
he thought worth looking at, but never insistently.
In certain cases, where he had simply to ease a burden,
from his own to the editorial shoulders, he would ask
that the aspirant might be delicately treated. There
might be personal reasons for this, but usually his
kindness of heart moved him. His tastes had their
geographical limit, but his sympathies were boundless,
and the hopeless creature for whom he interceded was
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OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
oftener remote from Boston and New England than
otherwise.
^ It seems to me that he had a nature singularly affec
tionate, and that it was this which was at fault if ho
gave somewhat too much of himself to the celebration
of the Class of '29, and all the multitude of Boston oc
casions, large and little, embalmed in the clear amber
of his verse, somewhat to the disadvantage of the am
ber. If he were asked he could not deny the many
friendships and fellowships which united in the ask
ing; the immediate reclame from these things was sweet
to him ; but he loved to comply as much as he loved to be
praised. In the pleasure he got he could feel himself
a prophet in his own country, but the country which
owned him prophet began perhaps to feel rather too
much as if it owned him, and did not prize his vatici
nations at all their worth. Some polite Bostonians
knew him chiefly on this side, and judged him to their
own detriment from it.
VI
After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and
the delight in it were so wholly there that in ten years
I had hardly been in as many Boston houses. As I
have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses', and
at Longfellow's, when he came out to a Dante supper,
which was not often, and somewhat later at the Satur
day Club dinners. One parlous time at the publisher's
I have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher
Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homoeopathy, and
it required all the tact of the host to lure them away
from the dangerous theme. As it was, a battle waged
in the courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well
through the dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a
truce was called. I need not say which was heterodox,
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
or that each had a deep and strenuous conscience in the
matter. I have always felt it a proof of his extreme
leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to
tolerate my own defection from the elder faith in medi
cine; and I could not feel his kindness less caressing
because I knew it a concession to an infirmity. He
said something like, After all a good physician was the
great matter; and I eagerly turned his clemency to
praise of our family doctor.
He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long
as his strength permitted, and few of its members
missed fewer of its meetings. He continued to sit at
its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne, of Agassiz, of
Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less
famous, bore him company there among the younger
men in the flesh. It must have been very melancholy,
but nothing could deeply cloud his most cheerful spirit.
His strenuous interest in life kept him alive to all the
things of it, after so many of his friends were dead.
The questions which he was wont to deal with so fond
ly, so wisely, the great problems of the soul, were all
the more vital, perhaps, because the personal concern in
them was increased by the translation to some other
being of the men who had so often tried with him to
fathom them here. The last time I was at that table he
sat alone there among those great memories ; but he was
as gay as ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his humor
gleamed ; the poetic touch was deft and firm as of old ;
the serious curiosity, the instant sympathy remained.
To the witness he was pathetic, but to himself he could
only have been interesting, as the figure of a man sur
viving, in an alien but not unfriendly present, the past
which held so vast a part of all that had constituted
him. If he had thought of himself in this way, it
would have been without one emotion of self-pity, such
162
as more maudlin souls indulge, but with a love of
knowledge and. wisdom as keenly alert as in his prime.
For three privileged years I lived all but next-door
neighbor of Doctor Holmes in that part of Beacon
Street whither he removed after he left his old home in
Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather
often. We were both on the water side, which means
so much more than the words say, and our library win
dows commanded the same general view of the Charles
rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sun
sets, and curving eastward under Long Bridge, through
shipping that increased onward to the sea. He said that
you could count fourteen towns and villages in the com
pass of that view, with the three conspicuous monu
ments accenting the different attractions of it : the tower
of Memorial Hall at Harvard; the obelisk on Bunker
Hill; and in the centre of the picture that bulk of
Tufts College which he said he expected to greet his
eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other
world. But the prospect, though generally the same,
had certain precious differences for each of us, which I
have no doubt he valued himself as much upon as I
did. I have a notion that he fancied these were to bo
enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let
into the bay there apart from the windows, for he was
apt to make you come and look out of them if you got
to talking of the view before you left. In this pleasant
study he lived among the books, which seemed to multi
ply from case to case and shelf to shelf, and climb from
floor to ceiling. Everything was in exquisite order,
and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat
as if the sloven disarray of most authors' desks were
impossible to him. He had a number of ingenious
little contrivances for helping his work, which he liked
to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
corner of his desk seemed to be his pet ; and after that
came his fountain-pen, which he used with due ob
servance of its fountain principle, though he was tol
erant of me when I said I always dipped mine in the
inkstand ; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain-
pen in anywise. After you had gone over these objects
with him, and perhaps taken a peep at something he
wras examining through his microscope, he sat down at
one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy-
chair at the other. His talk was always considerate of
your wish to be heard, but the person who wished to
talk when he could listen to Doctor Holmes was his own
victim, and always the loser. If you were well advised
you kept yourself to the question and response which
manifested your interest in what he was saying, and let
him talk on, with his sweet smile, and that husky laugh
he broke softly into at times. Perhaps he was not very
well when you came in upon him ; then he would name
his trouble, with a scientific zest and accuracy, and pass
quickly to other matters. As I have noted, he was
interested in himself only on the universal side; and
he liked to find his peculiarity in you better than to
keep it his own ; he suffered a visible disappointment if
he could not make you think or say you were so and so
too. The querulous note was not in his most cheerful
register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief;
though sometimes I have known him touch very lightly
and currently upon a slight annoyance, or disrelish for
this or that. As he grew older, he must have had, of
course, an old man's disposition to speak of his infirmi
ties ; but it was fine to see him catch himself up in this,
when he became conscious of it, and stop short with an
abrupt turn to something else. With a real interest,
which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate
some little ingenious thing that had fallen in his way,
164
and I have heard him expatiate with childlike delight
upon the merits of a new razor he had got: a sort of
mower, which he could sweep recklessly over cheek and
chin without the least danger of cutting himself. The
last time I saw him he asked me if he had ever shown
me that miraculous razor ; and I doubt if he quite liked
my saying I had seen one of the same kind.
It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chim
ney-corner rather as the type of a person having a good
time than as such a person ; he would rather be up and
about something, taking down a book, making a note,
going again to his little windows, and asking you if you
had seen the crowrs yet that sometimes alighted on the
shoals left bare by the ebb-tide behind the house. The
reader will recall his lovely poem, " My Aviary," which
deals with the winged life of that pleasant prospect. I
shared with him in the flock of wild-ducks which used
to come into our neighbor waters in spring, when the
ice broke up, and stayed as long as the smallest space
of brine remained unfrozen in the fall. He was gra
ciously willing I should share in them, and in the cloud
of gulls which drifted about in the currents of the sea
and sky there, almost the whole year round. I did not
pretend an original right to them, coming so late as I
did to the place, and I think rny deference pleased him.
VII
As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked
you to respect them, or to be sensible of them. As often
as I went to see him I was made to wait in the little
reception-roorn below, and never shown at once to his
study. My name would be carried up, and I would
hear him verifying my presence from the maid through
the opened door ; then there came a cheery cry of wel-
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
come : " Is that you ? Come up, come up !" and I found
him sometimes half-way down the stairs to meet me.
He would make an excuse for having kept me below a
moment, and say something about the rule he had to
observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his
fence a personal thing. I was aware how thoroughly
his gentle spirit pervaded the whole house; the Irish
maid who opened the door had the effect of being a
neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little
formality ; she apologized in her turn for the reception-
room; there was certainly nothing trampled upon in
her manner, but affection and reverence for him whose
gate she guarded, with something like the sentiment she
would have cherished for a dignitary of the Church,
but nicely differenced and adjusted to the Autocrat's
peculiar merits.
The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had
lately knocked at my own door was about to enter. I
met the master of the house on the landing of the stairs
outside his study, and he led me in for the few mo
ments we could spend together. He spoke of the
shadow so near, and said he supposed there could be no
hope, but he did not refuse the cheer I offered him from
my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something
that was thought or said he smiled, with even a breath
of laughter, so potent is the wont of a lifetime, though
his eyes were full of tears, and his voice broke with his
words. Those who have sorrowed deepest will under
stand this best.
It was during the few years of our Beacon Street
neighborhood that he spent those hundred days abroad
in his last visit to England and France. He was full
of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity
gave me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at
first hand. He whimsically pleased himself most with
166
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
his Derby-day experiences, and enjoyed contrasting
the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty
years earlier, when he had seen some famous race of
the Derby won; nothing else in England seemed to
have moved him so much, though all that royalties,
dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had
been done. Of certain things that happened to him,
characteristic of the English, and interesting to him
in their relation to himself through his character
of universally interested man, he spoke freely; but
he has said what he chose to the public about them,
and I have no right to say more. The thing that
most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to
have been described in one of the London papers as
quite deaf; and I could truly say to him that I had
never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him accused of
it before. " Oh, yes," he said, " I am a little hard of
hearing on one side. But it isn't deafness."
He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age
that make themselves painfully or inconveniently evi
dent. He carried his slight figure erect, and until his
latest years his step was quick and sure. Once he
spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of
something that was said, and " They will shrink, you
•know," he added, as if he were not at all concerned in
the fact himself. If you met him in the street, you
encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman,
with a clean-shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified
by the involuntary frown of his thick, senile brows;
well coated, lustrously shod, well gloved, in a silk hat,
latterly wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he
did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at
such times I think it was kind to spare his years the
fatigue of recalling your identity; at any rate, I am
glad of the times when I did so. In society he had the
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
same vagueness, the same dimness; but after the mo
ment he needed to make sure of you, he was as vivid
as ever in his life. He made me think of a bed of
embers on which the ashes have thinly gathered, and
which, when these are breathed away, sparkles and
tinkles keenly up with all the freshness of a newly
kindled fire. He did not mind talking about his age,
and I fancied rather enjoyed doing so. Its approaches
interested him ; if he was going, he liked to know just
how and when he was going. Once he spoke of his
lasting strength in terms of imaginative humor: he
was still so intensely interested in nature, the universe,
that it seemed to him he was not like an old man so
much as a lusty infant which struggles against having
the breast snatched from it. He laughed at the notion
of this, with that impersonal relish which seemed to me
singularly characteristic of the self-consciousness so
marked in him. I never heard one lugubrious word
from him in regard to his years. He liked your sym
pathy on all grounds where he could have it self-re-
spectf ully, but he was a most manly spirit, and he would
not have had it even as a type of the universal decay.
Possibly he would have been interested to have you
share in that analysis of himself which he was always
making, if such a thing could have been.
He had not much patience with the unmanly craving
for sympathy in others, and chiefly in our literary craft,
which is somewhat ignobly given to it, though he was
patient, after all. He used to say, and I believe he has
said it in print, that unless a man could show a good
reason for writing verse, it was rather against him, and
a proof of weakness. I suppose this severe conclusion
was something he had reached after dealing with in
numerable small poets who sought the light in him with
verses that no editor would admit to print. Yet of mor-
168
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
bidness he was often very tender; he knew it to be
disease, something that must be scientifically rather
than ethically treated. He was in the same degree kind
to any sensitiveness, for he was himself as sensitive as
he was manly, and he was most delicately sensitive to
any rightful social claim upon him. I was once at a
dinner with him, where he was in some sort my host, in
a company of people whom he had not seen me with
before, and he made a point of acquainting me with
each of them. It did not matter that I knew most of
them already; the proof of his thoughtfulness was
precious, and I was sorry when I had to disappoint it
by confessing a previous knowledge.
VIII
I had three memorable meetings with him not very
long before he died : one a year before, and the other two
within a few months of the end. The first of these was
at luncheon in the summer-house of a friend whose
hospitality made it summer the year round, and we all
went out to meet him, when he drove up in his open car
riage, with the little sunshade in his hand, which he
took with him for protection against the heat, and also,
a little, I think, for the whim of it. He sat a moment
after he arrived, as if to orient himself in respect to
each of us. Beside the gifted hostess, there was the
most charming of all the American essayists, and the
Autocrat seemed at once to find himself singularly at
home with the people who greeted him. There was no
interval needed for fanning away the ashes ; he tinkled
up before he entered the house, and at the table he was
as vivid and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed I
ever saw him as much so. The talk began at once, and
we had made him believe that there was nothing ego-
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
tistic in his taking the word, or turning it in illustration
from himself upon universal matters. I spoke among
other things of some humble ruins on the road to
Gloucester, which gave the way-side a very aged look;
the tumbled foundation-stones of poor bits of houses,
and " Ah," he said, " the cellar and the well ?" He
added, to the company generally, " Do you know what
I think are the two lines of mine that go as deep as any
others, in a certain direction ?" and he began to repeat
stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier
poems, until he came to the closing couplet. But I will
give them in full, because in going to look them up I
have found them so lovely, and because I can hear his
voice again in every fondly accented syllable :
'•' Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet,
The lowliest home where human hearts have beat?
Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain,
A century's showery torrents wash in vain;
Its starving orchard where the thistle blows,
And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows;
Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen
Next an old roof, or where a roof has been;
Its knot-grass, plantain, — all the social weeds,
Man's mute companions following where he leads;
Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling
heads,
Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds;
Its woodbine creeping where it used to climb;
Its roses breathing of the olden time;
All the poor shows the curious idler sees,
As life's thin shadows waste by slow degrees,
Till naught remains, the saddening talc to tell,
Save home's last wrecks — the cellar and the well!"
The poet's chanting voice rose with a triumphant
swell in the climax, and " There," he said, " isn't it so ?
The cellar and the well — they can't be thrown down or
burnt up ; they are the human monuments that last
longest and defy decay." He rejoiced openly in the
170
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
sympathy that recognized with him the divination of a
most pathetic, most signal fact, and he repeated the
last couplet again at our entreaty, glad to be entreated
for it. I do not know whether all will agree with him
concerning the relative importance of the lines, but I
think all must feel the exquisite beauty of the picture to
which they give the final touch.
He said a thousand witty and brilliant things that
day, but his pleasure in this gave me the most pleasure,
and I recall the passage distinctly out of the dimness
that covers the rest. He chose to figure us younger
men, in touching upon the literary circumstance of the
past and present, as representative of modern feeling
and thinking, and himself as no longer contemporary.
We knew he did this to be contradicted, and we pro
tested, affectionately, fervently, with all our hearts and
minds; and indeed there were none of his generation
who had lived more widely into ours. He was not a
prophet like Emerson, nor ever a voice crying in the
wilderness like Whittier or Lowell. His note was
heard rather amid the sweet security of streets, but it
was always for a finer and gentler civility. He imag
ined no new rule of life, and no philosophy or theory of
life will be known by his name. He was not con
structive; he was essentially observant, and in this he
showed the scientific nature. He made his reader
known to himself, first in the little, and then in the
larger things. From first to last he was a censor, but
a most winning and delightful censor, who could make
us feel that our faults were other people's, and who was
not wont
" To bait his homilies with his brother worms."
At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far
as Reform was concerned, or perhaps reformers, who
171
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
are so often tedious and ridiculous ; but lie seemed to
get a new heart with the new mind which came to him
when he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the
light mocker of former days became the serious and
compassionate thinker, to whom most truly nothing
that was human was alien. His readers trusted and
.loved him; few men have ever written so intimately
with so much dignity, and perhaps none has so en
deared himself by saying just the thing for his reader
that his reader could not say for himself. He sought
the universal through himself in others, and he found
to his delight and theirs that the most universal thing
was often, if not always, the most personal thing.
In my later meetings with him I was struck more
and more by his gentleness. I believe that men are apt
to grow gentler as they grow older, unless they are of
the curmudgeon type, which rusts and crusts with age,
but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly
marked. He seemed to shrink from all things that
could provoke controversy, or even difference; ho
waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather
sought the things that he could agree with you upon.
In the "last talk I had with him he appeared to have
no grudge left, except for the puritanic orthodoxy in
which he had been bred as a child. This he was not
able to forgive, though its tradition was interwoven
with what was tenderest and dearest in his recollections
of childhood. We spoke of puritanism, and I said I
sometimes wondered what could be the mind of a man
towards life who had not been reared in its awful
shadow, say an English Churchman, or a Continental
Catholic; and he said he could not imagine, and that
he did not believe such a man could at all enter into
our feelings ; puritanism, he seemed to think, made an
essential and ineradicable difference. I do not believe
172
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
lie had any of that false sentiment which attributes vir
tue of character to severity of creed, while it owns the
creed to be wrong.
He differed from Longfellow in often speaking of his
contemporaries. lie spoke of them frankly, but with
an appreciative rather than a censorious criticism. Of
Longfellow himself he said that day, when I told him
I had been writing about him, and he seemed to me
a man without error, that he could think of but one
error in him, and that was an error of taste, of al
most merely literary taste. It was at an earlier time
that he talked of Lowell, after his death, and told me
that Lowell once in the fever of his antislavery apos-
tolate had written him, urging him strongly, as a matter
of duty, to come out for the cause he had himself so
much at heart. Afterwards Lowell wrote again, own
ing himself wrong in his appeal, which he had come to
recognize as invasive. " He was ten years younger
than I," said the doctor.
I found him that day I speak of in his house at Bev
erly Farms, where he had a pleasant study in a corner
by the porch, and he met me with all the cheeriness of
old. But he confessed that he had been greatly broken
up by the labor of preparing something that might be
read at some commemorative meeting, and had suffered
from finding first that he could not write something
specially for it. Even the copying and adapting an old
poem had overtaxed him, and in this he showed the
failing powers of age. But otherwise he was still
young, intellectually; that is, there was no failure of
interest in intellectual things, especially literary things.
Some new book lay on the table at his elbow, and he
asked me if I had seen it, and made some joke about his
having had the good luck to read it, and have it lying
by him a few days before when the author called. I do
173
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
not know whether he schooled himself against an old
man's tendency to revert to the past or not, but I know
that he seldom did so. That morning, however, he
made several excursions into it, and told me that his
youthful satire of the Spectre Pig had been provoked
by a poem of the elder Dana's, where a phantom
horse had been seriously employed, with an effect of
anticlimax which he had found irresistible. Another
foray was to recall the oppression and depression of his
early religious associations, and to speak with moving
tenderness of his father, whose hard doctrine as a min
ister was without effect upon his own kindly nature.
In a letter written to me a few weeks after this time,
upon an occasion when he divined that some word from
him would be more than commonly dear, he recurred to
the feeling he then expressed : " Fifty-six years ago —
more than half a century — I lost my own father, his age
being seventy-three years. As I have reached that peri
od of life, passed it, and now left it far behind, my
recollections seem to brighten and bring back my boy
hood and early manhood in a clearer and fairer light
than it came to me in my middle decades. I have often
wished of late years that I could tell him how I
cherished his memory; perhaps I may have the happi
ness of saying all I long to tell him on the other side of
that thin partition which I love to think is all that di
vides us."
Men are never long together without speaking of
women, and I said how inevitably men's lives ended
where they began, in the keeping of women, and their
strength failed at last and surrendered itself to their
care. I had not finished before I was made to feel that
I was poaching, and " Yes," said the owner of the pre
serve, " I have spoken of that," and he went on to tell
me just where. He was not going to have me suppose
174
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
I had invented those notions, and I could not do less
than own that I must have found them in his book, and
forgotten it.
He spoke of his pleasant summer life in the air, at
once soft and fresh, of that lovely coast, and of his
drives up and down the country roads. Sometimes this
lady and sometimes that came for him, and one or two
habitually, but he always had his own carriage ordered
if they failed, that he might not fail of his drive in any
fair weather. His cottage was not immediately on the
sea, but in full sight of it, and there was a sense of the
sea about it, as there is in all that incomparable region,
and I do not think he could have been at home anywhere
beyond the reach of its salt breath.
I was anxious not to outstay his strength, and I kept
my eye on the clock in frequent glances. I saw that he
followed me in one of these, and I said that I knew
what his hours were, and I was watching so that I
might go away in time, and then he sweetly protested.
Did I like that chair I was sitting in? It was a gift
to him, and he said who gave it, with a pleasure in the
fact that was very charming, as if he liked the associa
tion of the thing with his friend. He was disposed to
excuse the formal look of his bookcases, which were
filled with sets, and presented some phalanxes of fiction
in rather severe array.
When I rose to go, he was concerned about my being
able to find my way readily to the station, and he told
me how to go, and what turns to take, as if he liked
realizing the way to himself. I believe he did not walk
much of late years, and I fancy he found much the
same pleasure in letting his imagination make this ex
cursion to the station with me that he would have found
in actually going.
I saw him once irore, but only once, when a day or
175
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
two later he drove up by our hotel in Magnolia towards
the cottage -where his secretary was lodging. He saw
us from his carriage, and called us gayly to him, to
make us rejoice with him at having finally got that com
memorative poem off his mind. He made a jest of the
trouble it had cost him, even some sleeplessness, and
said he felt now like a convalescent. He was all bright
ness, and friendliness, and eagerness to make us feel
his mood, through what was common to us all; and I
am glad that this last impression of him is so one with
the first I ever had, and with that which every reader
receives from his work.
That is bright, and friendly and eager too, for it is
throughout the very expression of himself. I think it
is a pity if an author disappoints even the unreasonable
expectation of the reader, whom his art has invited to
love him ; but I do not believe that Doctor Holmes could
inflict this disappointment. Certainly he could disap
point no reasonable expectation, no intelligent expecta
tion. What he wrote, that he was, and every one felt
this who met him. He has therefore not died, as some
men die, the remote impersonal sort, but he is yet thrill-
ingly alive in every page of his books. The quantity
of his literature is not great, but the quality is very
surprising, and surprising first of all as equality. From
the beginning to the end he wrote one man, of course in
his successive consciousnesses. Perhaps every one does
this, but his work gives the impression of an uncommon
continuity, in spite of its being the effect of a later and
an earlier impulse so very marked as to have made the
later an astonishing revelation to those who thought
they knew him.
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
IX
It is not for mo in such a paper as this to attempt any
judgment of his work. I have loved it, as I loved him,
with a sense of its limitations which is by no means a
censure of its excellences. He was not a man who
cared to transcend ; he liked bounds, he liked horizons,
the constancy of shores. If he put to sea, he kept in
sight of land, like the ancient navigators. He did not
discover new continents ; and I will own that I, for my
part, should not have liked to sail with Columbus. I
think one can safely affirm that as great and as useful
men stayed behind, and found an America of the mind
without stirring from their thresholds.
pan Sfjtb
THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
WE bad expected to stay in Boston only until wo
could find a house in Old Cambridge. This
was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for the
ancient town had not yet quickened its scholarly pace
to the modern step. Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the
impulse of expansion was not yet visibly felt any
where ; the enormous material growth that followed the
civil war had not yet begun. In Cambridge the houses
to be let were few, and such as there were fell either be
low our pride or rose above our purse. I wish I might
tell how at last we bought a house ; we had no money, but
we were rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink
from the story of their constant faith in a financial fut
ure which we sometimes doubted, and who backed their
credulity with their credit. It is sufficient for the pres
ent record, which professes to be strictly literary, to
notify the fact that on the first day of May, 1866, we
went out to Cambridge and began to live in a house
which we owned in fee if not in deed, and which was
none the less valuable for being covered with mort
gages. Physically, it was a carpenter's box, of a sort
which is readily imagined by the Anglo-American gen
ius for ugliness, but which it is not so easy to impart a
just conception of. A trim hedge of arbor-vitso tried to
hide it from the world in front, and a tall board fence
behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too
178
THE WHITE ME. LONGFELLOW
well planted) with pears, grapes, and currants, and
there was a small open space which I lost no time in
digging up for a kitchen-garden. On one side of us
were the open fields ; on the other a brief line of neigh
bor-houses; across the street before us was a grove of
stately oaks, which I never could persuade Aldrich had
painted leaves on them in the fall. We were really in a
poor suburb of a suburb ; but such is the fascination of
ownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged
property, that we calculated the latitude and longitude
of the whole earth from the spot we called ours. In our
walks about Cambridge we saw other places where we
might have been willing to live; only, we said, they
were too far off. We even prized the architecture of
our little box, though we had but so lately lived in a
Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and were
not uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others.
Positive beauty we could not have honestly said we
thought our cottage had as a whole, though we might
have held out for something of the kind in the brackets
of turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly
content with it ; and with life in Cambridge, as it began
to open itself to us, we were infinitely more than con
tent. This life, so refined, so intelligent, so gracefully
simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its
parallel.
I
It was the moment before the old American customs
had been changed by European influences among people
of easier circumstances ; and in Cambridge society kept
what was best of its village traditions, and chose to
keep them in the full knowledge of different things.
Nearly every one had been abroad; and nearly every
one had acquired the taste for olives without losing a
13 179
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
relish for native sauces; through the intellectual life
there was an entire democracy, and I do not believe
that since the capitalistic era began there was ever a
community in which money counted for less. There
was little show of what money could buy; I remember
but one private carriage (naturally, a publisher's) ; and
there was not one livery, except a livery in the larger
sense kept by the stableman Pike, who made us pay
now a quarter and now a half dollar for a seat in his
carriages, according as he lost or gathered courage for
the charge. We thought him extortionate, and we most
ly walked through snow and mud of amazing depth and
thickness.
The reader will imagine how acceptable this circum
stance was to a young literary man beginning life with
a fully mortgaged house and a salary of untried elas
ticity. If there were distinctions made in Cambridge
they were not against literature, and we found our
selves in the midst of a charming society, indifferent,
apparently, to all questions but those of the higher
education which comes so largely by nature. That is to
say, in the Cambridge of that day (and, I dare say, of
this) a mind cultivated in some sort was essential, and
after that came civil manners, and the willingness and
ability to bo agreeable and interesting; but the ques
tion of riches or poverty did not enter. Even the ques
tion of family, which is of so great concern in New
England, was in abeyance. Perhaps it was taken for
granted that every one in Old Cambridge society must
be of good family, or he could not be there ; perhaps his
mere residence tacitly ennobled him; certainly his ac
ceptance was an informal patent of gentility. To my
mind, the structure of society was almost ideal, and
until we have a perfectly socialized condition of things
I do not believe we shall ever have a more perfect soci-
180
THE WHITE ME. LONGFELLOW
ety. The instincts which governed it were not such as
can arise from the sordid competition of interests ; they
flowed from a devotion to letters, and from a self-sacri
fice in material things which I can give no better no
tion of than by saying that the outlay of the richest
college magnate seemed to be graduated to the income of
'the poorest.
In those days, the men whose names have given
splendor to Cambridge were still living there. I shall
forget some of them in the alphabetical enumeration of
Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, Eichard Henry Dana,
Jun., John Fiske, Dr. Asa Gray, the family of the
Jameses, father and sons, Lowell, Longfellow, Charles
Eliot ^Norton, Dr. John G. Palfrey, James Pierce, Dr.
Peabody, Professor Parsons, Professor Sophocles. The
variety of talents and of achievements was indeed so
great that Mr. Bret Harte, when fresh from his Pacific
slope, justly said, after listening to a partial rehearsal
of them, " Why, you couldn't fire a revolver from your
front porch anywhere without bringing down a two-
volumer !" Everybody had written a book, or an article,
or a poem ; or was in the process or expectation of doing
it, and doubtless those whose names escape me will
have greater difficulty in eluding fame. These kindly,
these gifted folk each came to see us and to make us at
home among them; and my home is still among them,
on this side and on that side of the line between the
living and the dead which invisibly passes through all
the streets of the cities of men.
11
We had the whole summer for the exploration of
Cambridge before society returned from the mountains
and the sea-shore, and it was not till October that I saw
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Longfellow. I heard again, as I heard when I first
came to Boston, that he was at Nahant, and though
Nahant was no longer so far away, now, as it was then,
I did not think of seeking him out even when we went
for a day to explore that coast during the summer. It
seems strange that I cannot recall just when and where
I saw him, but early after his return to Cambridge I
had a message from him asking me to come to a meet
ing of the Dante Club at Craigie House.
Longfellow was that winter (1866-7) revising his
translation of the Paradiso, and the Dante Club was the
circle of Italianate friends and scholars whom he in
vited to follow him and criticise his work from the
original, while he read his version aloud. Those who
were most constantly present were Lowell and Professor
Norton, but from time to time others came in, and wre
seldom sat down at the nine-o'clock supper that fol
lowed the reading of the canto in less number than ten
or twelve.
The criticism, especially from the accomplished
Danteists I have named, was frank and frequent. I be
lieve they neither of them quite agreed with Longfellow
as to the form of version he had chosen, but, waiving
that, the question was how perfectly he had done his
work upon the given lines. I myself, with whatever
right, great or little, I may have to an opinion, believe
thoroughly in Longfellow's plan. When I read his
version my sense aches for the rhyme which he rejected,
but my admiration for his fidelity to Dante otherwise
is immeasurable. I remember with equal admiration
the subtle and sympathetic scholarship of his critics,
who scrutinized every shade of meaning in a word or
phrase that gave them pause, and did not let it pass
till all the reasons and facts had been considered. Some
times, and even often, Longfellow yielded to their cen-
182
THE WHITE ME. LONGFELLOW
sure, but for the most part, when he was of another
mind, he held to his mind, and the passage had to go as
he said. I make a little haste to say that in all the meet
ings of the Club, during a whole winter of Wednesday
evenings, I myself, though I faithfully followed in an
Italian Dante with the rest, ventured upon one sug
gestion only. This was kindly, even seriously, con
sidered by the poet, and gently rejected. lie could not
do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not suf
fered to feel that I had done a presumptuous thing. I
can see him now, as he looked up from the proof-sheets
on the round table before him, and over at me, growing
consciously smaller and smaller, like something through
a reversed opera-glass. lie had a shaded drop-light in
front of him, and in its glow his beautiful and benignly
noble head had a dignity peculiar to him.
All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more
or less bad and good, for there was something as simple
in the physiognomy as in the nature of the man. His
head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his
hair long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine,
but mildly leonine, as the old painters conceived the
lion of St. Mark. Once Sophocles, the ex-monk of
Mount Atlios, so long a Greek professor at Harvard,
came in for supper, after the reading was over, and he
was leonine too, but of a fierceness that contrasted finely
with Longfellow's mildness. I remember the poet's
asking him something about the punishment of im
paling, in Turkey, and his answering, with an ironical
gleam of his fiery eyes, " Unhappily, it is obsolete." I
dare say he was not so leonine, either, as he looked.
When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow,
with a mellow resonant murmur, like the note of some
deep-throated horn. His voice was very lulling in
quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early
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LITEEAKY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
effect with an old scholar who sat in a cavernous arm
chair at the corner of the fire, and who drowsed audibly
in the soft tone and the gentle heat. The poet had a
fat terrier who wished always to be present at the
meetings of the Club, and he commonly fell asleep at
the same moment with that dear old scholar, so that
when they began to make themselves heard in concert,
one could not tell which it was that most took our
thoughts from the text of the Paradiso. When the duet
opened, Longfellow would look up with an arch recog
nition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of
the canto. At the close he would speak to his friend and
lead him out to supper as if he had not seen or heard
anything amiss.
Ill
In that elect company I was silent, partly because I
was conscious of my youthful inadequacy, and partly
because I preferred to listen. But Longfellow always
behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifying
and delightful things, and from time to time he ad
dressed himself to me, so that I should not feel left out.
He did not talk much himself, and I recall nothing
that he said. But he always spoke both wisely and
simply, without the least touch of pose, and with no
intention of effect, but with something that I must call
quality for want of a better word; so that at a table
where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agas-
siz beamed, he cast the light of a gentle gayety, which
seemed to dim all those vivider luminaries. While he
spoke you did not miss Fields's story or Tom Apple-
ton's wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. Norton,
with his unequalled intuitions.
The supper was very plain : a cold turkey, which the
host carved, or a haunch of venison, or some braces of
184
THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
grouse, or a platter of quails, with a deep bowl of salad,
and the sympathetic companionship of those elect vin
tages which Longfellow loved, and which he chose with
the inspiration of affection. We usually began with
oysters, and when some one who was expected did not
come promptly, Longfellow invited us to raid his plate,
as a just punishment of his delay. One evening Low
ell remarked, with the cayenne poised above his blue-
points, " It's astonishing how fond these fellows are
of pepper."
The old friend of the cavernous arm-chair was per
haps not wide enough awake to repress an " Ah ?" of
deep interest in this fact of natural history, and Lowell
was provoked to go on. " Yes, I've dropped a red pep
per pod into a barrel of them, before now, and then
taken them out in a solid mass, clinging to it like a
swarm of bees to their queen."
" Is it possible ?" cried the old friend ; and then
Longfellow intervened to save him from worse, and
turned the talk.
I reproach myself that I made no record of the talk,
for I find that only a few fragments of it have caught in
my memory, and that the sieve which should have kept
the gold has let it wash away with the gravel. I re
member once Doctor Uolmes's talking of the physician
as the true seer, whose awful gift it was to behold with
the fatal second sight of science the shroud gathering
to the throat of many a doomed man apparently in per
fect health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered
days. The thought may have been suggested by some
of the toys of superstition which intellectual people like
to play with.
I never could be quite sure at first that Longfellow's
brother-in-law, Appleton, was seriously a spiritualist,
even when he disputed the most strenuously with the
185
LITEEAEY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
unbelieving Autocrat. But he really was in earnest
about it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his
doctrine, like some clerics when they are in the safe
company of other clerics. lie told me once of having
recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very remarkable
seance, where the souls of the departed outdid them
selves in the athletics and acrobatics they seem so fond
of over there, throwing large stones across the room,
moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables and setting
them a-twirl under the chandelier. " And now," he de
manded, " what do you say to that ?" " Well, Mr. Ap-
pleton," Agassiz answered, to Appleton's infinite de
light, " I say that it did not happen."
One night they began to speak at the Dante supper
of the unhappy man whose crime is a red stain in the
Cambridge annals, and one and another recalled their
impressions of Professor Webster. It was possibly
with a retroactive sense that they had all felt some
thing uncanny in him, but, apropos of the deep salad-
bowl in the centre of the table, Longfellow remember
ed a supper Webster was at, where he lighted some
chemical in such a dish and held his head over it, with
a handkerchief noosed about his throat and lifted
above it with one hand, while his face, in the pale light,
took on the livid ghastliness of that of a man hanged
by the neck.
Another night the talk wandered to the visit which
an English author (now with God) paid America at
the height of a popularity long since toppled to the
ground, with many another. He was in very good
humor with our whole continent, and at Longfellow's
table he found the champagne even surprisingly fine.
" But," he said to his host, who now told the story, " it
cawn't be genuine, you know !"
Many years afterwards this author revisited our
186
THE WHITE ME. LONGFELLOW
shores, and I dined with him at Longfellow's, where
he was anxious to constitute himself a guest during
his sojourn in our neighborhood. Longfellow was
equally anxious that he should not do so, and he took
a harmless pleasure in outmanoeuvring him. He seized
a chance to speak with me alone, and plotted to de
liver him over to me without apparent unkindness,
when the latest horse-car should be going in to Boston,
and begged me to walk him to Harvard Square and put
him aboard. " Put him aboard, and don't leave him
till the car starts, and then watch that he doesn't get
off."
These instructions he accompanied with a lifting of
the eyebrows, and a pursing of the mouth, in an anx
iety not altogether burlesque. He knew himself the
prey of any one who chose to batten on him, and his
hospitality was subject to frightful abuse. Perhaps
Mr. Norton has somewhere told how, when he asked
if a certain person who had been outstaying his time
was not a dreadful bore, Longfellow answered, with
angelic patience, "Yes; but then you know I have
been bored so often !"
There was one fatal Englishman whom I shared
with him during the great part of a season: a poor
soul, not without gifts, but always ready for more,
especially if they took the form of meat and drink.
He had brought letters from one of the best English
men alive, who withdrew them too late to save his
American friends from the sad consequences of wel
coming him. So lie established himself impregnably
in a Boston club, and came out every day to dine with
Longfellow in Cambridge, beginning with his return
from Nahant in October and continuing far into De
cember. That was the year of the great horse-dis
temper, when the plague disabled the transportation
187
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
in Boston, and cut off all intercourse between the
suburb and the city on the street railways. " I did
think," Longfellow pathetically lamented, " that when
the horse-cars stopped running, I should have a little
respite from L., but he walks out."
In the midst of his own suffering he was willing to
advise with me concerning some poems L. had offered
to the Atlantic Monthly, and after we had desperately
read them together he said, with inspiration, " I think
these things are more adapted to music than the mag
azine," and this seemed so good a notion that when L.
came to know their fate from me, I answered, confi
dently, " I think they are rather more adapted to mu
sic."
He calmly asked, " Why ?" and as this was an
exigency whicli Longfellow had not forecast for me, I
was caught in it without hope of escape. I really do
not know what I said, but I know that I did not take
the poems, such was my literary conscience in those
days; I am afraid I should be weaker now.
IV
The suppers of the Dante Club were a relaxation
from the severity of their toils on criticism, and I will
not pretend that their table-talk was of that seriousness
which duller wits might have given themselves up to.
The passing stranger, especially if a light or jovial
person, was always welcome, and I never knew of the
enforcement of the rule I heard of, that if you came
in without question on the Club nights, you were a
guest; but if you rang or knocked, you could not get
in.
Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Apple-
ton proposed that Longfellow should show us his wine-
188
THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
cellar. He took up the candle burning on the table
for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of the
beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as
Washington's headquarters while he was in Cam
bridge, and as the home of Longfellow for so many
years. The taper cast just the right gleams on the
darkness, bringing into relief the massive piers of
brick, and the solid walls of stone, which gave the cel
lar the effect of a casemate in some fortress, and leav
ing the corners and distances to a romantic gloom.
This basement was a work of the days when men built
more heavily if not more substantially than now, but
I forget, if I ever knew, what date the wine-cellar was
of. It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly
cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had
any more charm than the shelves of a library: it is the
inside of bottles and of books that makes its appeal.
The whole place witnessed a bygone state and luxury,
which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or two.
Longfellow once spoke of certain old love-letters which
dropped down on the basement stairs from some
place overhead ; and there was the fable or the fact of
a subterranean passage under the street from Craigie
House to the old Batchelder House, which I relate
to these letters with no authority I can allege. But in
Craigie House dwelt the proud fair lady who was
buried in the Cambridge church-yard with a slave at
her head and a slave at her feet.
"Dust is in her beautiful eyes,"
and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their
time over those love-letters, I will leave the reader to
say. The fortunes of her Tory family fell with those
of" their party, and the last Vassal ended his days a
prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a
189
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
weekly enlargement on Sundays, when the law could
not reach him. It is known how the place took Long
fellow's fancy when he first came to be professor in
Harvard, and how he was a lodger of the last Mistress
Craigie there, long before he became its owner. The
house is square, with Longfellow's study where he read
and wrote on the right of the door, and a statelier li
brary behind it; on the left is the drawing-room, with
the dining-room in its rear ; from its square hall climbs
a beautiful stairway with twisted banisters, and a tall
clock in their angle.
The study where the Dante Club met, and where
I mostly saw Longfellow, was a plain, pleasant room,
with broad panelling in white painted pine; in the
centre before the fireplace stood his round table, laden
with books, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner
by the window was a high desk which he sometimes
stood at to write. In this room Washington held his
councils and transacted his business with all comers;
in the chamber overhead he slept. I do not think
Longfellow associated the place much with him, and I
never heard him speak of Washington in relation to
it except once, when he told me with peculiar relish
what he called the true version of a pious story con
cerning the aide-de-camp who blundered in upon him
while he knelt in prayer. The father of his coun
try rose and rebuked the young man severely, and then
resumed his devotions. " He rebuked him," said
Longfellow, lifting his brows and making rings round
the pupils of his eyes, " by throwing his scabbard at
his head."
All the front windows of Craigie House look
out over the open fields across the Charles, which is
now the Longfellow Memorial Garden. The poet used
to be amused with the popular superstition that he was
190
THE WHITE ME. LONGFELLOW
holding this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the
price of lots, while all he wanted was to keep a feat
ure of his beloved landscape unchanged. Lofty elms
drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn bil
lowed clumps of the lilac, which formed a thick hedge
along the fence. There was a terrace part way down
this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade was
set some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed
always to have been there. Long verandas stretched
on either side of the mansion ; and behind was an old-
fashioned garden with beds primly edged with box
after a design of the poet's own. Longfellow had a
ghost story of this quaint plaisance, which he used to
tell with an artful reserve of the catastrophe. He was
coming home one winter night, and as he crossed the
garden he was startled by a white figure swaying be
fore him. But he knew that the only way was to ad
vance upon it. He pushed boldly forward, and was
suddenly caught under the throat — by the clothes-line
with a long night-gown on it.
Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the
Dante Club that I heard him tell this story. The even
ings were sometimes mornings before the reluctant
break-up came, but they were never half long enough
for me. I have given no idea of the high reasoning
of vital things which I must often have heard at that
table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof that I
did not hear it. The memory will not be ruled as to
what it shall bind and what it shall loose, and I should
entreat mine in vain for record of those meetings other
than what I have given. Perhaps it would be well,
in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the
social intercourse of great wits must be, for me to in
vent some ennobling and elevating passages of conver
sation at Longfellow's; perhaps I ought to do it for
191
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
the sake of my own repute as a serious and adequate
witness. But I am rather helpless in the matter; I
must set down what I remember, and surely if I can
remember no phrase from Holmes that a reader could
live or die by, it is something to recall how, when
a certain potent cheese was passing, he leaned over to
gaze at it, and asked : " Does it kick ? Does it kick ?"
No strain of high poetic thinking remains to me from
Lowell, but he made me laugh unforgettably with his
passive adventure one night going home late, when a
man suddenly leaped from the top of a high fence upon
the sidewalk at his feet, and after giving him the worst
fright of his life, disappeared peaceably into the dark
ness. To be sure, there was one most memorable sup
per, when he read the " Bigelow Paper " he had fin
ished that day, and enriched the meaning of his verse
with the beauty of his voice. There lingers yet in my
sense his very tone in giving the last line of the passage
lamenting the waste of the heroic lives which in those
dark hours of Johnson's time seemed to have been
" Butchered to make a blind man's holiday."
The hush that followed upon his ceasing was of that
finest quality which spoken praise always lacks; and
I suppose that I could not give a just notion of these
Dante Club evenings without imparting the effect of
such silences. This I could not hopefully undertake
to do; but I am tempted to some effort of the kind by
my remembrance of Longfellow's old friend George
Washington Greene, who often came up from his home
in Rhode Island, to be at those sessions, and who was
a most interesting and amiable fact of those delicate
silences. A full half of his earlier life had been pass
ed in Italy, where he and Longfellow met and loved
each other in their youth with an affection which the
192
THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
poet was constant to in his age, after many vicissi
tudes, with the beautiful fidelity of his nature. Greene
was like an old Italian house-priest in manner, gentle,
suave, very suave, smooth as creamy curds, cultivated
in the elegancies of literary taste, and with a certain
meek abeyance. I think I never heard him speak",
in all those evenings, except when Longfellow address
ed him, though he must have had the Dante scholar
ship for an occasional criticism. It was at more re
cent dinners, where I met him with the Longfellow
family alone, that he broke now and then into a quo
tation from some of the modern Italian poets he knew
by heart (preferably Giusti), and syllabled their verse
with an exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching
Florentine rhythm. Now and then at these times he
brought out a faded Italian anecdote, faintly smelling
of civet, and threadbare in its ancient texture. He
liked to speak of Goldoni and of ISFota, of Niccolini and
Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you came
to America, of the Revolution and his grandfather,
the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene, whose life he
wrote (and I read) in three volumes. He worshipped
Longfellow, and their friendship continued while they
lived, but towards the last of his visits at Craigie
House it had a pathos for the witness which I should
grieve to wrong. Greene was then a quivering para
lytic, and he clung tremulously to Longfellow's arm
in going out to dinner, where even the modern Italian
poets were silent upon his lips. When we rose from
table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took
him upon his arm again for their return to the study.
He was of lighter metal than most other members of
the Dante Club, and he was not of their immediate in
timacy, living away from Cambridge, as he did, and
I shared his silence in their presence with full sym-
193
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
pathy. I was by far the youngest of their number, and
I cannot yet quite make out why I was of it at all. But
at every moment I was as sensible of my good fortune
as of my ill desert. They were the men whom of all
men living I most honored, and it seemed to be impos
sible that I at my age should be so perfectly fulfilling
the dream of my life in their company. Often the
nights were very cold, and as I returned home from
Craigie House to the carpenter's box on Sacramento
Street, a mile or two away, I was as if soul-borne
through the air by my pride and joy, while the frozen
blocks of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet
stumbling along the middle of the road. I still think
that was the richest moment of my life, and I look back
at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance,
which I would most like to live over again — if I must
live any.
The next winter the sessions of the Dante Club were
transferred to the house of Mr. Norton, who was then
completing his version of the Vita Nuova. This has
always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art
than Longfellow's translation of the Commedia. In
fact, it joins the effect of a sympathy almost mounting
to divination with a patient scholarship and a delicate
skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work. I do not
know whether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself better
in his prose version of the Commedia than in this
of the Vita Nuova, but I do not believe he could
have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his
sonnets and canzonets. I am sure he might have done
this if he had chosen. He has always pretended that it
was impossible, but miracles are never impossible in the
.right hands.
THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
After three or four years we sold the carpenter's box
on Sacramento Street, and removed to a larger house
near Harvard Square, and in the immediate neighbor
hood of Longfellow. He gave me an easement across
that old garden behind his house, through an opening
in the high board fence which enclosed it, and I saw
him oftener than ever, though the meetings of the
Dante Club had come to an end. At the last of them,
Lowell had asked him, with fond regret in his jest,
" Longfellow, why don't you do that Indian poem in
forty thousand verses ?" The demand but feebly ex
pressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the
Indian poem existed only by the challenger's invention.
Before I leave my faint and unworthy record of these
great times I am tempted to mention an incident
poignant with tragical associations. The first night after
Christmas the holly and the pine wreathed about the
chandelier above the supper-table took fire from the
gas, just as we came out from the reading, and Long
fellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands
down and bore them out. JSTo one could speak for
thinking what he must be thinking of when the inef
fable calamity of his home befell it. Curtis once told
me that a little while before Mrs. Longfellow's death
he was driving by Craigic House with Holmes, who
said he trembled to look at it, for those who lived there
had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the
changes which must come to them, could fail to be for
the worse.
I did not know Longfellow before that fatal time, and
I shall not say that his presence bore record of it ex
cept in my fancy. He may always have had that look
14 ' 195
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
of one who had experienced the utmost harm that fate
can do, and henceforth could possess himself of what
was left of life in peace. He could never have been a
man of the flowing ease that makes all comers at home ;
some people complained of a certain gene in him; and
he had a reserve with strangers, which never quite lost
itself in the abandon of friendship, as Lowell's did,
He was the most perfectly modest man I ever saw, ever
imagined, but he had a gentle dignity which I do not
believe any one, the coarsest, the obtusest, could tres
pass upon. In the years when I began to know him,
his long hair and the beautiful beard which mixed with
it were of one iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a per
fect silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion,
which Appleton so admired, lost itself in the wanness
of age and pain. When he walked, he had a kind of
spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thought
lifted him from the ground. It was fine to meet him
coming down a Cambridge street; you felt that the en
counter made you a part of literary history, and set
you apart with him for the moment from the poor and
mean. When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beat
ified if not beautified the ugliest and vulgarest looking
spot on the planet outside of New York. You could
meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of the
same provision-man as he ; and Longfellow remained as
constant to his tradespeople as to any other friends. He
rather liked to bring his proofs back to the printer's
himself, and we often found ourselves together at the
University Press, where the Atlantic Monthly used to
be printed. But outside of his own house Longfellow
seemed to want a fit atmosphere, and I love best to think
of him in his study, where he wrought at his lovely art
with a serenity expressed in his smooth, regular, and
scrupulously perfect handwriting. It was quite ver-
196
THE WHITE ME. LONGFELLOW
tical, and rounded, with a slope neither to the right nor
left, and at the time I knew him first, he was fond of
using a soft pencil on printing paper, though common
ly he wrote with a quill. Each letter was distinct in
shape, and between the verses was always the exact
space of half an inch. I have a good many of his poems
written in this fashion, but whether they were the first
drafts or not I cannot say; very likely not. Towards
the last he no longer sent his poems to the magazines in
his own hand, but they were always signed in autograph.
I once asked him if he were not a great deal inter
rupted, and he said, with a faint sigh, Not more than
was good for him, he fancied ; if it were not for the in
terruptions, he might overwork. He was not a friend
to stated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as
Lowell was; he had not, indeed, the childish associa
tions of the younger poet with the Cambridge neigh
borhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure
except on the east veranda of his house, though I was
told he loved walking in his youth. In this and in some
other things Longfellow was more European than
American, more Latin than Saxon. He once said
quaintly that one got a great deal of exercise in putting
on and off one's overcoat and overshoes.
I suppose no one who asked decently at his door was
denied access to him, and there must have been times
when he was overrun with volunteer visitors; but I
never heard him complain of them. He was very
charitable in the immediate sort which Christ seems to
have meant; but he had his preferences, humorously
owned, among beggars. He liked the German beggars
least, and the Italian beggars most, as having most
savoir-faire; in fact, we all loved the Italians in Cam
bridge, lie was pleased with the accounts I could give
him of the love and honor I had known for him in
197.
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Italy, and one day there came a letter from an Italian
admirer, addressed to " Mr. Greatest Poet Longfel
low," which he said was the very most amusing super
scription he had ever seen.
It is known that the King of Italy offered Longfel
low the cross of San Lazzaro, which is the Italian lit
erary decoration. It came through the good offices of
my old acquaintance Professor Messadaglia, then a
deputy in the Italian Parliament, whom, for some rea
son I cannot remember, I had put in correspondence
with Longfellow. The honor was wholly unexpected,
and it brought Longfellow a distress which was chiefly
for the gentleman who had procured him the impos
sible distinction. lie showed me the pretty collar and
cross, not, I think, without a natural pleasure in it. ~No
man was ever less a bigot in things civil or religious
than he, but he said, firmly, " Of course, as a republi
can and a Protestant, I can't accept a decoration from
a Catholic prince." His decision was from his con
science, and I think that all Americans who think duly
about it will approve his decision.
VI
Such honors as he could fitly permit himself he did
not refuse, and I recall what zest he had in his elec
tion to the Arcadian Academy, which had made him a
shepherd of its Eoman Fold, with the title, as he said,
of " Olimipico something." But I fancy his sweetest
pleasure in his vast renown came from his popular
recognition everywhere. Few were the lands, few the
languages he was unknown to : he showed me a version
of the " Psalm of Life " in Chinese. Apparently even
the poor lost autograph-seeker was not denied by his
universal kindness ; I know that he kept a store of auto-
198
THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
graphs ready written on small squares of paper for all
who applied by letter or in person; he said it was no
trouble ; but perhaps he was to be excused for refusing
the request of a lady for fifty autographs, which she
wished to offer as a novel attraction to her guests at a
lunch party.
Foreigners of all kinds thronged upon him at their
pleasure, apparently, and with perfect impunity. Some
times he got a little fun, very, very kindly, out of their
excuses and reasons ; and the Englishman who came to
see him because there were no ruins to visit in America
was no fable, as I can testify from the poet himself.
But he had no prejudice against Englishmen, and even
at a certain time when the coarse-handed British criti
cism began to blame his delicate art for the universal
acceptance of his verse, and to try to sneer him into
the rank of inferior poets, he was without rancor for
the clumsy misliking that he felt. He could not under
stand rudeness; he was too finely framed for that; he
could know it only as Swedenborg's most celestial angels
perceived evil, as something distressful, angular. The
ill-will that seemed nearly always to go with adverse
criticism made him distrust criticism, and the dis
comfort which mistaken or blundering praise gives
probably made him shy of all criticism. He said
that in his early life as an author he used to seek
out and save all the notices of his poems, but in his
latter days he read only those that happened to fall
in his way; these he cut out and amused his leisure
by putting together in scrap - books. He was re
luctant to make any criticism of other poets ; I do not
remember ever to have heard him make one; and his
writings show no trace of the literary dislikes or con
tempts which we so often mistake in ourselves for right-
eons judgments. No doubt he had his resentments, but
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
he hushed them in his heart, which he did not suffer
them to embitter. While Poe was writing of " Long
fellow and other Plagiarists/' Longfellow was helping
to keep Poe alive by the loans which always made them
selves gifts in Poe's case. He very, very rarely spoke
of himself at all, and almost never of the grievances
which he did not fail to share with all who live.
He was patient, as I said, of all things, and gentle
beyond all mere gentlemanliness. But it would have
been a great mistake to mistake his mildness for soft
ness. It was most manly and firm; and of course it
was braced with the New England conscience he was
born to. If he did not find it well to assert himself, ho
was prompt in behalf of his friends, and one of the
fine things told of him was his resenting some cen
sures of Sumner at a dinner in Boston during the old
pro-slavery times: he said to the gentlemen present
that Sumner was his friend, and he must leave their
company if they continued to assail him.
But he spoke almost as rarely of his friends as of
himself. He liked the large, impersonal topics which
could be dealt with on their human side, and involved
characters rather than individuals. This was rather
strange in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our
instances from the environment. It was not the only
thing he was strange in there ; he was not to that man
ner born ; he lacked the final intimacies which can come
only of birth and lifelong association, and which make
the men of the Boston breed seem exclusive when they
least feel so; he was Longfellow to the friends who
were James, and Charles, and Wendell to one another.
He and Hawthorne were classmates at college, but I
never heard him mention Hawthorne; I never heard
him mention Whittier or Emerson. I think his reti
cence about his contemporaries was largely due to his
200
THE WHITE ME. LONGFELLOW
reluctance from criticism: he was the finest artist of
them all, and if he praised he must have praised with
the reservations of an honest man. Of younger writers
he was willing enough to speak. No new contributor
made his mark in the magazine unnoted by him, and
sometimes I showed him verse in manuscript which gave
me peculiar pleasure. I remember his liking for the
first piece that Mr. Maurice Thompson sent me, and
how lie tasted the fresh flavor of it, and inhaled its
wild new fragrance. He admired the skill of some of
the young story-tellers; he praised the subtlety of one
in working out an intricate character, and said modest
ly that lie could never have done that sort of thing him
self. It was entirely safe to invite his judgment when
in doubt, for he never suffered it to become aggressive,
or used it to urge upon me the manuscripts that must
often have been urged upon him.
Longfellow had a house at Nahant where he went
every summer for more than a quarter of a century.
He found the slight transition change enough from
Cambridge, and liked it perhaps because it did not take
him beyond the range of the friends and strangers
whose company he liked. Agassiz was there, and Ap-
pleton; Sumner came to sojourn with him; and the
tourists of all nations found him there in half an hour
after they reached Boston. His cottage was very plain
and simple, but was rich in the sight of the illimitable, •
sea, arid it had a luxury of rocks at the foot of its gar
den, draped with sea-weed, and washed with the inde
fatigable tides. As he grew older and feebler he ceased
to go to ISTahant ; he remained the whole year round at
Cambridge ; he professed to like the summer which he
said warmed him through there, better than the cold
spectacle of summer which had no such effect at Nahant.
The hospitality which was constant at either house
201
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
was not merely of the worldly sort. Longfellow loved
good cheer; he tasted history and poetry in a precious
wine; and ho liked people who were acquainted with
manners and men, and brought the air of capitals with'
them. But often the man who dined with Longfellow
was the man who needed a dinner; and from what I
have seen of the sweet courtesy that governed at that
board, I am sure that such a man could never have felt
himself the least honored guest. The poet's heart was
open to all the homelessness of the world ; and I remem
ber how once when we sat at his table and I spoke of his
poem of " The Challenge," then a new poem, and said
how I had been touched by the fancy of
" The poverty-stricken millions
Who challenge our wine and bread,
And impeach us all as traitors,
Both the living and the dead,"
his voice sank in grave humility as he answered, " Yes,
I often think of those things." He had thought of them
in the days of the slave, when he had taken his place
with the friends of the hopeless and hapless, and as long
as he lived he continued of the party which had freed
the slave. He did not often speak of politics, but when
the movement of some of the best Republicans away
from their party began, he said that he could not see the
wisdom of their course. But this was said without
censure or criticism of them, and so far as I know he
never permitted himself anything like denunciation of
those who in any wise differed from him. On a matter
of yet deeper interest, I do not feel authorized to speak
for him, but I think that as he grew older, his hold upon
anything like a creed weakened, though he remained of
the Unitarian philosophy concerning Christ. He did
not latterly go to church, I believe ; but then, very few
of his circle were church-goers. Once he said some-
202
THE WHITE ME. LONGFELLOW
thing very vague and uncertain concerning the doctrine
of another life when I affirmed my hope of it, to the
effect that he wished he could be sure, with the sigh
that so often clothed the expression of a misgiving with
him.
VII
When my acquaintance with Longfellow began he
had written the things that made his fame, and that it
will probably rest upon : " Evangeline," " Hiawatha,"
and the " Courtship of Miles Standish " were by that
time old stories. But during the eighteen years that I
knew him he produced the best of his minor poems, the
greatest of his sonnets, the sweetest of his lyrics. His
art ripened to the last, it grew richer and finer, and it
never knew decay. He rarely read anything of his own
aloud, but in three or four cases he read to me poems
he had just finished, as if to give himself the pleasure
of hearing them with the sympathetic sense of another.
The hexameter piece, " Elizabeth," in the third part of
" Tales of a Wayside Inn," was one of these, and he
liked my liking its rhythmical form, which I believed
one of the measures best adapted to the English speech,
and which he had used himself with so much pleasure
and success.
About this time he was greatly interested in the slight
experiments I was beginning to make in dramatic form,
and he said that if he were himself a young man he
should write altogether for the stage; he thought the
drama had a greater future with us. He was pleased
when a popular singer wished to produce his " Masque
of Pandora," with music, and he was patient when it
failed of the effect hoped for it as an opera. When the
late Lawrence Barrett, in the enthusiasm which was
one of the fine traits of his generous character, had
203
taken my play of " A Counterfeit Presentment/' and
came to the Boston Museum with it, Longfellow could
not apparently have been more zealous for its popular
acceptance if it had been his own work. He invited
himself to one of the rehearsals with me, and he sat
with me on the stage through the four acts with a forti
tude which I still wonder at, and with the keenest zest
for all the details of the performance. No finer testi
mony to the love and honor which all kinds of people
had for him could have been given than that shown by
the actors and employees of the theatre, high and low.
They thronged the scenery, those who were not upon the
stage, and at the edge of every wing were faces peering
round at the poet, who sat unconscious of their adora
tion, intent upon the play. He was intercepted at every
step in going out, and made to put his name to the pho
tographs of himself which his worshippers produced
from their persons.
He came to the first night of the piece, and when it
seemed to be finding favor with the public, he leaned
forward out of his line to nod and smile at the author ;
when they had the author up, it was the sweetest flat
tery of the applause which abused his fondness that
Longfellow clapped first and loudest.
Where once he had given his kindness he could not
again withhold it, and he was anxious no fact should be
interpreted as withdrawal. When the Emperor Dom
Pedro of Brazil, who was so great a lover of Longfel
low, came to Boston, he asked himself out to dine with
the poet, who had expected to offer him some such hos
pitality. Soon after, Longfellow met me, and as if
eager to forestall a possible feeling in me, said, " I
wanted to ask you to dinner with the Emperor, but he
not only sent word he was coming, he named his fellow-
guests!" I answered that though I should probably
204
THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
never come so near dining with an emperor again, I
prized his wish to ask me much more than the chance
I had missed ; and with this my great and good friend
seemed a little consoled. I believe that I do not speak
too confidently of our relation. He was truly the
friend of all men, but I had certainly the advantage
of my propinquity. We were near neighbors, as the
pleonasm has it, both when I lived on Berkeley Street
and after I had built my own house on Concord Ave
nue ; and I suppose he found my youthful informality
convenient. He always asked me to dinner when his
old friend Greene came to visit him, and then *ve had
an Italian time together, with more or less repetition
in our talk, of what we had said before of Italian poe
try and Italian character. One day there came a note
from him saying, in effect, " Salvini is coming out to
dine with me to-morrow night, and I want you to come
too. There wrill be no one else but Greene and myself,
and we will have an Italian dinner."
Unhappily I had accepted a dinner in Boston for
that night, and this invitation put me in great misery.
I must keep my engagement, but how could I bear to
miss meeting Salviiii at Longfellow's table on terms
like these? We consulted at home together and ques
tioned whether I might not rush into Boston, seek out
my host there, possess him of the facts, and frankly
throw myself on his mercy. Then a sudden thought
struck us: Go to Longfellow, and submit the case to
him! I went, and he entered with delicate sympathy
into the affair. But he decided that, taking the large
view of it, I must keep my engagement, lest I should
run even a remote risk of wounding my friend's sus
ceptibilities. I obeyed, and I had a very good time, but
I still feel that I missed the best time of my life, and
that I ought to be rewarded for my sacrifice, somewhere.
205
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THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
las, when he spoke of people, and in Cambridge, where
there was a good deal of contempt for the less lettered,
and we liked to smile though we did not like to sneer,
and to analyze if we did not censure, Longfellow and
Longfellow's house were free of all that. Whatever
his feeling may have been towards other sorts^ and con
ditions of men, his effect was of an entire democracy.
lie was always the most unassuming person in any
company, and at sonic large public dinners where I saw
him I found him patient of the greater attention that
more public men paid themselves and one another.
lie was not a speaker, and I never saw him on his feet
at dinner, except once, when he read a poem for Whit-
tier, who was absent, lie disliked after-dinner speak
ing, and made conditions for his own exemption from
it.
VIII
Once your friend, Longfellow was always your
friend ; lie would not think evil of you, and if he knew
evil of you, he would be the last of all that knew it to
judge you for it. This may have been from the im
personal habit of his mind, but I believe it was also
the effect of principle, for ho would do what he could
to arrest the delivery of judgment from others, and
would soften the sentences passed in his presence.
Naturally this brought him under some condemnation
with those of a severer cast; and I have heard him
criticised for his benevolence towards all, and his con
stancy to some who were not quite so true to them
selves, perhaps, lint this leniency of Longfellow's
was what constituted him great as well as good, for it
is not our wisdom that censures others. As for his
goodness, I never saw a fault in him. I do not mean
to say that he had no faults, or that there were no bet-
ter men, but only to give the witness of my knowledge
concerning him. I claim in no wise to have been his
intimate ; such a thing was not possible in my case for
quite apparent reasons; and I doubt if Longfellow
was capable of intimacy in the sense we mostly attach
to the word. Something more of egotism than I ever
found in him must go to the making of any intimacy
which did not come from the tenderest affections of his
heart. But as a man shows himself to those often with
him, and in his noted relations with other men, he
showed himself without blame. All men that I have
known, besides, have had some foible (it often endear
ed them the more), or some meanness, or pettiness,
or bitterness; but Longfellow had none, nor the sug
gestion of any. No breath of evil ever touched his
name ; he went in and out among his fellow-men with
out the reproach that follows wrong; the worst thing
I ever heard said of him was that he had gene., and this
was said by one of those difficult Cambridge men who
would have found gene in a celestial angel. Some
thing that Bjornstjerne Bjornson wrote to ine when he
was leaving America after a winter in Cambridge,
comes nearer suggesting Longfellow than all my talk.
The Norsemen, in the days of their stormy and reluc
tant conversion, used always to speak of Christ as the
White Christ, and Bjornson said in his letter, " Give
my love to the White Mr. Longfellow."
A good many years before Longfellow's death he
began to be sleepless, and he suffered greatly. He
said to me once that he felt as if he were going about
with his heart in a kind of mist. The whole night
through he would not be aware of having slept. " But,"
he would add, with his heavenly patience, " I always
get a good deal of rest from lying down so long." I
cannot say whether these conditions persisted, or how
208 -
THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
much his insomnia had to do with his breaking health" ;
three or four years before the end came, we left Cam
bridge for a house farther in the country, and I saw
him less frequently than before. He did not allow
our meetings to cease; he asked me to dinner from'
time to time, as if to keep them up, but it could not
be with the old frequency. Once he made a point of
coming to see us in our cottage on the hill west of Cam
bridge, but it was with an effort not visible in the days
when he could end one of his brief walks at our house
on Concord Avenue; he never came but he left our
house more luminous for his having been there. Once
he came to supper there to meet Garfield (an old fam
ily friend of mine in Ohio), and though he was suffer
ing from a heavy cold, he would not scant us in his
stay. I had some very bad sherry which he drank
with the serenity of a martyr, and I shudder to this
day to think what his kindness must have cost him.
He told his story of the clothes-line ghost, and Garfield
matched it with the story of an umbrella ghost who
sheltered a friend of his through a midnight storm,
but was not cheerful company to his beneficiary, who
passed his hand through him at one point in the effort
to take his arm.
After the end of four years I came to Cambridge to
be treated for a long sickness, which had nearly been
my last, and when I could get about I returned the
visit Longfellow had not failed to pay me. But I did
not find him, and I never saw him again in life. I
went into Boston to finish the winter of 1881-2, and
from time to time I heard that the poet was failing in
health. As soon as I felt able to bear the horse-car
journey I went out to Cambridge to see him. I had
knocked once at his door, the friendly door that had
so often opened to Ids welcome, and stood with the
209
LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
knocker in my hand when the door was suddenly set
ajar, and a maid showed her face wet with tears.
" How is Mr. Longfellow ?" I palpitated, and with a
burst of grief she answered, " Oh, the poor gentleman
has just departed !" I turned away as if from a help
less intrusion at a death-bed.
' At the services held in the house before the obsequies
at the cemetery, I saw the poet for the last time, where
" Dead he lay among his books,"
in the library behind his study. Death seldom fails
to bring serenity to all, and I will not pretend that
there was a peculiar peacefulness in Longfellow's no
ble mask, as I saw it then. It was calm and benign
as it had been in life ; he could not have worn a gentler
aspect in going out of the world than he had always
worn in it; he had not to wait for death to dignify
it with " the peace of God." All who were left of
his old Cambridge were present, and among those who
had come farther was Emerson. He went up to the
bier, and with his arms crossed on his breast, and his
elbows held in either hand, stood with his head patheti
cally fallen forward, looking down at the dead face.
Those who knew how his memory was a mere blank,
with faint gleams of recognition capriciously coming
'and going in it, must have felt that he was struggling
ito remember who it was lay there before him ; and for
me the electly simple words confessing his failure will
always be pathetic with his remembered aspect: " The
gentleman we have just been burying," he said, to the
friend who had come with him, " was a sweet and beau
tiful soul ; but I forget his name."
I had the privilege and honor of looking over the
imprinted poems Longfellow left behind him, and of
helping to decide which of them should be published.
210
THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW
There were not many of them, and some of these few
were quite fragmentary. I gave my voice for the pub
lication of all that had any sort of completeness, for
in every one there was a touch of his exquisite art, the
grace of his most lovely spirit. We have so far had two
men only who felt the claim of their gift to the very
best that the most patient skill could give its utterance :
one was Hawthorne and the other was Longfellow. I
shall not undertake to say which was the greater artist
of these two; but I am sure that every one who has
studied it must feel with me that the art of Longfellow
held out to the end with no touch of decay in it, and
that it equalled the art of any other poet of his time.
It knew when to give itself, and more and more it knew
when to withhold itself.
What Longfellow's place in literature will be, I
shall not offer to say; that is Time's affair, not mine;
but I am sure that with Tennyson and Browning he
fully shared in the expression of an age which more
completely than any former age got itself said by its
poets.
IS
f»art Seventb
STUDIES OF LOWELL
" HAVE already spoken of my earliest meetings with
-*- Lowell at Cambridge when I came to New Eng
land on a literary pilgrimage from the West in 1860.
I saw him more and more after I went to live in
Cambridge in 1866; and I now wish to record what I
knew of him during the years that passed between this
date and that of his death. If the portrait I shall try
to paint does not seem a faithful likeness to others
who knew him, I shall only claim that so he looked to
me, at this moment and at that. If I do not keep my
self quite out of the picture, what painter ever did ?
It was in the summer of 1865 that I came home
from my consular post at Venice ; and two weeks after
I landed in Boston, I went out to see Lowell at Elm-
wood, and give him an inkstand that I had brought
him from Italy. The bronze lobster whose back open
ed and disclosed an inkpot and a sand-box was quite
ugly; but I thought it beautiful then, and if Lowell
thought otherwise he never did anything to let me
know it. He put the thing in the middle of his writ
ing-table (he nearly always wrote on a pasteboard pad
resting upon his knees), and there it remained as long
as I knew the place — a matter of twenty-five years;
212,
STUDIES OF LOWELL
but in all that time I suppose the inkpot continued as
dry as the sand-box.
My visit was in the heat of August, which is as fer
vid in Cambridge as it can well be anywhere, and I
still have a sense of his study windows lifted to the
summer night, and the crickets and grasshoppers cry
ing in at them from the lawns and the gardens outside.
Other people went away from Cambridge in the sum
mer to the sea and to the mountains, but Lowell always
stayed at Elmwood, in an impassioned love for his
home and for his town. I must have found him there
in the afternoon, arid he must have made me sup with
him (dinner was at two o'clock) and then go with him
for a long night of talk in his study. He liked to have
some one help him idle the time away, and keep him as
long as possible from his work ; and no doubt I was im
personally serving his turn in this way, aside from any
pleasure he might have had in my company as some one
he had always been kind to, and as a fresh arrival from
the Italy dear to us both.
He lighted his pipe, and from the depths of his easy-
chair, invited my shy youth to all the ease it was capa
ble of in his, presence. It was not much ; I loved him,
and he gave me reason to think that he was fond of me,
but in Lowell I was always conscious of an older and
closer and stricter civilization than my own, an un
broken tradition, a more authoritative status. His de
mocracy was more of the head and mine more of the
heart, and his denied the equality which mine affirmed.
But his nature was so noble and his reason so tolerant
that whenever in our long acquaintance I found it
well to come to open rebellion, as I more than once did,
he admitted my right of insurrection, and never resent
ed the outbreak. I disliked to differ with him, and
perhaps he subtly felt this so much that he would not
213
LITEEARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
dislike me for doing it. He even suffered being taxed
with inconsistency, and where he saw that he had not
been quite just, he would take punishment for his
error, with a contrition that was sometimes humorous
and always touching.
Just then it was the dark hour before the dawn with
Italy, and he was interested but not much encouraged
by what I could tell him of the feeling in Venice
against the Austrians. lie seemed to reserve a like
scepticism concerning the fine things I was hoping for
the Italians in literature, and he confessed an interest
in the facts treated which in the retrospect, I am aware,
was more tolerant than participant of my enthusiasm.
That was always Lowell's attitude towards the opinions
of people he liked, when he could not go their lengths
with them, and nothing was more characteristic of his
affectionate nature and his just intelligence. He was a
man of the most strenuous convictions, but he loved
many sorts of people whose convictions he disagreed
with, and he suffered even prejudices counter to hia
own if they were not ignoble. In the whimsicalities
of others he delighted as much as in his own.
II
Our associations with Italy held over until the next
day, when after breakfast he went with me towards
Boston as far as " the village " : for so he liked to speak
of Cambridge in the custom of his younger days when
wide tracts of meadow separated Harvard Square from
his life-long home at Elmwood. We stood on the plat
form of the horse-car together, and when I objected to
his paying my fare in the American fashion, he allowed
that the Italian usage of each paying for himself was
the politer way. He would not commit himself about
214
STUDIES OF LOWELL
my returning to Venice (for I had not given up my
place, yet, and was away on leave), but he intimated
his distrust of the flattering conditions of life abroad,
lie said it was charming to be treated da signore, but
he seemed to doubt whether it was well ; and in this as
in all other things he showed his final fealty to the
American ideal.
It was that serious and great moment after the suc
cessful close of the civil war when the republican con
sciousness was more robust in us than ever before or
since ; but I cannot recall any reference to the historical
interest of the time in Lowell's talk. It had been all
about literature and about travel ; and now with the
suggestion of the word village it began to be a little
about his youth. I have said before how reluctant
he was to let his youth go from him; and perhaps the
touch with my juniority had made him realize how near
he was to fifty, and set him thinking of the past which
had sorrows in it to age him beyond his years. He
would never speak of these, though he often spoke of the
past. He told once of having beenonabricf journey when
he was six years old, with his father, and of driving up
to the gate of Elmwood in the evening, and his father
saying, " Ah, this is a pleasant place ! I wonder who
lives here — what little boy ?" At another time he
pointed out a certain window in his study, and said he
could see himself standing by it when he could only
get his chin on the window-sill. His memories of the
house, and of everything belonging to it, wero very
tender; but he could laugh over an escapade of his
youth when he helped his fellow-students pull down his
father's fences, in the pure zeal of good-comradeship.
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
III
My fortunes took me to New York, and I spent most
of the winter of 1865-6 writing in the office of The Na
tion. I contributed several sketches of Italian travel to
that paper; and one of these brought me a precious
letter from Lowell. lie praised my sketch, which he
said he had read without the least notion who had writ
ten it, and he wanted me to feel the full value of such
an impersonal pleasure in it. At the same time he did
not fail to tell me that he disliked some pseudo-cynical
verses of mine which he had read in another place ; and
I believe it was then that he bade me " sweat the Heine
out of " me, " as men sweat the mercury out of their
bones."
When I was asked to be assistant editor of the At
lantic Monthly, and came on to Boston to talk the mat
ter over with the publishers, I went out to Cambridge
and consulted Lowell. He strongly urged me to take
the position (I thought myself hopefully placed in lSTew
York 011 The Nation} ; and at the same time he seemed
to have it on his heart to say that he had recommended
some one else for it, never, he owned, having thought
of me.
He was most cordial, but after I came to live in
Cambridge (where the magazine was printed, and I
could more conveniently look over the proofs), he did
not call on me for more than a month, and seemed quite
to have forgotten me. We met one night at Mr. Nor
ton's, for one of the Dante readings, and he took no
special notice of me till I happened to say something
that offered him a chance to give me a little humorous
snub. I was speaking of a paper in the Magazine on
the " Claudian Emissary," and I demanded (no doubt a
little too airily) something like " Who in the world
216
STUDIES OF LOWELL
ever heard of the Claudian Emissary ?" " You are in
Cambridge, Mr. Howells," Lowell answered, and laugh
ed at my confusion. Having put me down, he seemed
to soften towards me, and at parting he said, with a
light of half-mocking tenderness in his beautiful eyes,
" Good-night, fellow-townsman." " I hardly knew we
were fellow-townsmen," I returned. He liked that,
apparently, and said he had been meaning to call upon
me, and that he was coming very soon.
He was as good as his word, and after that hardly a
week of any kind of weather passed but he mounted the
steps to the door of the ugly little house in which I
lived, two miles away from him, and asked me to walk.
These walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went
abroad for a winter in the early seventies. They took
us all over Cambridge, which he knew and loved every
inch of, and led us afield through the straggling, un
handsome outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish
neighborhoods, and fraying off into marshes and salt
meadows. He liked to indulge an excess of admiration
for the local landscape, and though I never heard him
profess a preference for the Charles River flats to the
finest Alpine scenery, I could well believe he' would do
so under provocation of a fit listener's surprise. He had
always so much of the boy in him that he liked to tease
the over-serious or over-sincere. He liked' to tease and
he liked to mock, especially his juniors, if any touch of
affectation, or any little exuberance of manner gave him
the chance; wrhen he once came to fetch me, and the
young mistress of the house entered with a certain ex
cessive elasticity, he sprang from his seat, and minced
towards her, with a burlesque of her buoyant carriage
—which made her laugh. When he had given us his
heart in trust of ours, he used us like a younger brother
and sister, or like bis own children. He included our
217
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
children in his affection, and he enjoyed our fondness
for them as if it were something that had come back
to him from his own youth. I think he had also a sort
of artistic, a sort of ethical pleasure in it, as being of
the good tradition, of the old honest, simple material,
from which pleasing effects in literature and civiliza
tion were wrought. He liked giving the children books,
and writing tricksy fancies in these, where he masked
as a fairy prince ; and as long as he lived he remembered
his early kindness for them.
IV
In those walks of ours I believe he did most of the
talking, and from his talk then and at other times there
remains to me an impression of his growing conserva
tism. I had in fact come into his life when it had spent
its impulse towards positive reform, and I was to be
witness of its increasing tendency towards the negative
sort. He was quite past the storm and stress of his anti-
slavery age ; with the close of the war which had broken
for him all his ideals of inviolable peace, he had reached
the age of misgiving. I do not mean that I ever heard
him express doubt of what ho had helped to do, or regret
for what he had done ; but I know that he viewed with
critical anxiety what other men were doing with the
accomplished facts. His anxiety gave a cast of what
one may call reluctance from the political situation, and
turned him back towards those civic and social defences
which he had once seemed willing to abandon. I do not
mean that he lost faith in democracy ; this faith he con
stantly then and signally afterwards affirmed; but he
certainly had no longer any faith in insubordination as
a means of grace. He preached a quite Socratic rever
ence for law, as law, and I remember that once when I
218
STUDIES OF LOWELL
had got back from Canada in the usual disgust for the
American custom-house, and spoke lightly of smug
gling as not an evil in itself, and perhaps even a right
under our vexatious tariff, he would not have it, but
held that the illegality of the act made it a moral of
fence. This was not the logic that would have justified
the attitude of the antislavery men towards the fugitive
slave act; but it was in accord with Lowell's feeling
about John Brown, whom he honored while always con
demning his violation of law ; and it was in the line of
all his later thinking. In this, he wished you to agree
with him, or at least he wished to make you ; but he did
not wish you to be more of his mind than he was him
self. In one of those squalid Irish neighborhoods I
confessed a grudge (a mean and cruel grudge, I now
think it) for the increasing presence of that race among
us, but this did not please him; and I am sure that
whatever misgiving he had as to the future of America,
he would not have had it less than it had been the
refuge and opportunity of the poor of any race or color.
Yet he would not have had it this alone. There was a
line in his poem on Agassiz which he left out of the
printed version, at the fervent entreaty of his friends,
as saying too bitterly his disappointment with his
country. Writing at the distance of Europe, and with
America in the perspective which the alien environ
ment clouded, he spoke of her as " The Land of Broken
Promise." It was a splendid reproach, but perhaps too
dramatic to bear the full test of analysis, and yet it had
the truth in it, and might, I think, have usefully stood,
to the end of making people think. Undoubtedly it ex
pressed his sense of the case, and in the same measure
it would now express that of many who love their coun
try most among us. It is well to hold one's country to
her promises, and if there are any who think she is for-
219
LITEKARY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
getting them it is their duty to say so, even to the point
of bitter accusation. I do not suppose it was the " com
mon man " of Lincoln's dream that Lowell thought
America was unfaithful to, though as I have suggested
he could be tender of the common man's hopes in her ;
but he was impeaching in that blotted line her sincerity
with the uncommon man : the man who had expected of
her a constancy to the ideals of her youth and to the
high martyr-moods of the war which had given an un
guarded and bewildering freedom to a race of slaves.
lie was thinking of the shame of our municipal corrup
tions, the debased quality of our national statesman
ship, the decadence of our whole civic tone, rather than
of the increasing disabilities of the hard-working poor,
though his heart when he thought of them was with
them, too, as it was in " the time when the slave would
not let him sleep."
He spoke very rarely of those times, perhaps because
their political and social associations were so knit up
with the saddest and tenderest personal memories, which
it was still anguish to touch. JSTot only was he
" — not of the race
That hawk their sorrows in the market place,"
but so far as rny witness went he shrank from mention
of them. I do not remember hearing him speak of the
young wife who influenced him so potently at the most
vital moment, and turned him from his whole scholarly
and aristocratic tradition to an impassioned champion
ship of the oppressed; and he never spoke of the chil
dren he had lost. I recall but one allusion to the days
when he was fighting the antislavery battle along the
whole line, and this was with a humorous relish of his
Irish servant's disgust in having to wait upon a negro
whom he had asked to his table.
He was rather severe in his notions of the subordina-
220
STUDIES OF LOWELL
tion his domestics owed him. They were " to do as they
were bid," and yet he had a tenderness for such as had
been any time with him, which was wounded when once
a hired man long in his employ greedily overreached
him in a certain transaction. He complained of that
with a simple grief for the man's indelicacy after so
many favors from him, rather than with any resent
ment. His hauteur towards his dependents was theo
retic; his actual behavior was of the gentle considera
tion common among Americans of good breeding, and
that recreant hired man had no doubt never been suf
fered to exceed him in shows of mutual politeness.
Often when the maid was about weightier matters, he
came and opened his door to me himself, welcoming me
with the smile that was like no other. Sometimes he
i$aid, " Sietc il benvenuto" or used some other Italian
phrase, which put me at ease with him in the region
where we were most at home together.
Looking back I must confess that I do not see what it
was he found to make him wish for my company, which
he presently insisted upon having once a week at din
ner. After the meal we turned into his study where
we sat before a wood fire in winter, and he smoked and
talked. lie smoked a pipe which was always needing
tobacco, or going out, so that I have the figure of him
before my eyes constantly getting out of his deep chair
to rekindle it from the fire with a paper lighter. He
was often out of his chair to get a book from the shelves
that lined the walls, either for a passage which he
wished to read, or for some disputed point which he
wished to settle. If I had caused the dispute, he enjoyed
putting me in the wrong; if he could not, he sometimes
whimsically persisted in his error, in defiance of all
•authority; but mostly he had such reverence for the
truth that he would not question it even in jest.
221 .
L1TEKAKY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt
to find him reading the old French poets, or the plays
of Calderon, or the Divina Gommedm, which he
magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted
with than I was because I knew some passages of it by
heart. One day I came in quoting —
" Io son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena,
Che i marinai in mezzo al mar dismago."
He stared at me in a rapture with the matchless
music, and then uttered all his adoration and despair
in one word. "Damn!" he said, and no more. I be
lieve he instantly proposed a walk that day, as if his
study walls with all their vistas into the great litera
tures cramped his soul liberated to a sense of ineffable
beauty of the verse of the somma poeta. But commonly
he preferred to have me sit down with him there among
the mute witnesses of the larger part of his life. Aa
I have suggested in my own case, it did not matter
much whether you brought anything to the feast or not.
If he liked you he liked being with you, not for what
he got, but for what he gave. He was fond of one man
whom I recall as the most silent man I ever met. I
never heard him say anything, not even a dull thing,
but Lowell delighted in him, and would have you believe
that he was full of quaint humor.
While Lowell lived there was a superstition, which
has perhaps survived him, that he was an indolent man,
wasting himself in barren studies and minor efforts
instead of devoting his great powers to some monu
mental work worthy of them. If the robust body of lit
erature, both poetry and prose, which lives after him
does not yet correct this vain delusion, the time will
.222
STUDIES OF LOWELL
come when it must ; and in the meantime the delusion
cannot vex him now. I think it did vex him, then, and
that he even shared it, and tried at times to meet such
shadowy claim as it had. One of the things that people
urged upon him was to write some sort of story, and it
is known how he attempted this in verse. It is less
known that he attempted it in prose, and that he went
so far as to write the first chapter of a novel. He read
this to me, and though I praised it then, I have a feel
ing now that if he had finished the novel it would have
been a failure. " But I shall never finish it," he sighed,
as if he felt irremediable defects in it, and laid the
manuscript away, to turn arid light his pipe. It was a
rather old-fashioned study of a whimsical character,
and it did not arrive anywhere, so far as it went; but
I believe that it might have been different with a
Yankee story in verse such as we have fragmentarily
in The Nooning and Fitz Adam's Story. Still, his
gift was essentially lyrical and meditative, with the
universal l^ew England tendency to allegory. He was
wholly undramatic in the actuation of the characters
which he imagined so dramatically. He liked to deal
with his subject at first hand, to indulge through him
self all the whim and fancy which the more dramatic
talent indulges through its personages.
He enjoyed writing such a poem as " The Cathedral,"
which is not of his best, but which is more immediately
himself, in all his moods, than some better poems. He
read it to me soon after it was written, and in the long
walk which we went hard upon the reading (our way
led us through the Port far towards East Cambridge,
where he wished to show me a tupelo-tree of his
acquaintance, because I said I had never seen one), his
talk was still of the poem which he was greatly in con
ceit of. Later his satisfaction with it received a check
223
LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
from the reserves of other friends concerning some
whimsical lines which seemed to them too great a drop
from the higher moods of the piece. Their reluctance
nettled him; perhaps he agreed with them; but he
would not change the lines, and they stand as he first
wrote them. In fact, most of his lines stand as he first
wrote them; he would often change them in revision,
and then, in a second revision go back to the first version.
He was very sensitive to criticism, especially from
those he valued through his head or heart. He would
try to hide his hurt, and he would not let you speak of
it, as though your sympathy unmanned him, but you
could see that he suffered. This notably happened in
my remembrance from a review in a journal which he
greatly esteemed ; and once when in a notice of my own
I had put one little thorny point among the flowers, he
confessed a puncture from it. lie praised the criticism
hardily, but I knew that ho winced under my recogni
tion of the didactic quality which he had not quite
guarded himself against in the poetry otherwise praised.
He liked your liking, and he openly rejoiced in it; and
I suppose he made himself believe that in trying his
verse with his friends he was testing it; but I do not
believe that he was, and I do not think he ever corrected
his judgment by theirs, however he suffered from it.
In any matter that concerned literary morals he was
more than eager to profit by another eye. One summer
he sent me for the Magazine a poem which, when I
read it, I trembled to find in motive almost exactly like
one we had lately printed by another contributor. There
was nothing for it but to call his attention to the re
semblance, and I went over to Elmwood with the two
poems. He was not at home, and I was obliged to leave
the poems, I suppose with some sort of note, for the
next morning's post brought me a delicious letter from
224;
him, all one cry of confession, the most complete, the
most ample. He did not trouble himself to say that his
poem was an unconscious reproduction of the other;
that was for every reason unnecessary, but he had at
once rewritten it upon wholly different lines ; and I do
not think any reader was reminded of Mrs. Akers's
" Among the Laurels " by Lowell's " Foot-path." He
was not only much more sensitive of others' rights than
his own, but in spite of a certain severity in him, he
was most tenderly regardful of their sensibilities when
he had imagined them : he did not always imagine them.
VI
At this period, between the years 1866 and 1874,
when he unwillingly went abroad for a twelvemonth,
Lowell was seen in very few Cambridge houses, and in
still fewer Boston houses. He was not an unsocial man,
but he was most distinctly not a society man. He loved
chiefly the companionship of books, and of men who
loved books; but of women generally he had an amus
ing diffidence ; he revered them and honored them, but
he would rather not have had them about. This is
oversaying it, of course, but the truth is in what I say.
There was never a more devoted husband, and he was
content to let his devotion to the sex end with that.
He especially could not abide difference of opinion in
women ; he valued their taste, their wit, their humor,
but he would have none of their reason. I was by one
day when he was arguing a point with one of his nieces,
and after it had gone on for some time, and the impar
tial witness must have owned that she was getting the
better of him he closed the controversy by giving her
a great kiss, with the words, " You are a very good
girl, my dear," and practically putting her out of the
225.
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
room. As to women of the flirtatious type, he did not
dislike them; no man, perhaps, does; but he feared
them, and he said that with them there was but one
way, and that was to run.
I have a notion that at this period Lowell was more
freely and fully himself than at any other. The pas
sions and impulses of his younger manhood had mel
lowed, the sorrows of that time had softened ; he could
blamelessly live to himself in his affections and his
sobered ideals. His was always a duteous life; but
he had pretty well given up making man over in his
own image, as we all wish some time to do, and then no
longer wish it. He fulfilled his obligations to his fel
low-men as these sought him out, but he had ceased to
seek them. He loved his friends and their love, but he
had apparently no desire to enlarge their circle. It
was that hour of civic suspense, in which public men
seemed still actuated by unselfish aims, and one not
essentially a politician might contentedly wait to see
what would come of their doing their best. At any rate,
without occasionally withholding open criticism or ac
claim Lowell waited among his books for the wounds
of the war to heal themselves, and the nation to begin
her healthfuller and nobler life. With slavery gone,
what might not one expect of American democracy !
His life at Elmwood was of an entire simplicity. In
the old colonial mansion in which he was born, he dwelt
in the embowering leafage, amid the quiet of lawns and
garden-plots broken by few noises ruder than those from
the elms and the syringas where
" The oriole clattered and the cat-bird sang."
From the tracks on Brattle Street, came the drowsy
tinkle of horse-car bells ; and sometimes a funeral trail
ed its black length past the corner of his grounds, and
,226
lost itself from sight under the shadows of the willows
that hid Mount Auburn from his study windows. In
the winter the deep New England snows kept their
purity in the stretch of meadow behind the house, which
a double row of pines guarded in a domestic privacy.
All was of a modest dignity within arid without the
house, which Lowell loved but did not imagine of a
manorial presence ; and he could not conceal his annoy
ance with an over-enthusiastic account of his home in
which the simple chiselling of some panels was vaunted
as rich wood-carving. There was a graceful staircase,
and a good wide hall, from which the dining-room and
drawing-room opened by opposite doors ; behind the last,
in the southwest corner of the house, was his study.
There, literally, he lived during the six or seven
years in which I knew him after my coming to Cam
bridge. Summer and winter he sat there among his
books, seldom stirring abroad by day except for a walk,
and by night yet more rarely. He went to the monthly
mid-day dinner of the Saturday Club in Boston; he
was very constant at the fortnightly meetings of his
whist-club, because he loved the old friends who formed
it ; he came always to the Dante suppers at Longfellow's,
and he was familiarly in and out at Mr. Norton's, of
course. But, otherwise, he kept to his study, except for
some rare and almost unwilling absences upon uni
versity lecturing at Johns Hopkins or at Cornell.
For four years I did not take any summer outing
from Cambridge myself, and my associations with Elm-
wood and with Lowell are more of summer than of
winter weather meetings. But often we went our walks
through the snows, trudging along between the. horse-
car tracks which enclosed the only well-broken-out paths
in that simple old Cambridge. I date one memorable
expression of his from such a walk, when, as we were
16 -227
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
passing Longfellow's house, in mid-street, he came as
near the declaration of his religious faith as he ever did
in my presence. He was speaking of the New Testa
ment, and he said, The truth was in it; but they had
covered it up with their hagiology. Though he had
been bred a Unitarian, and had more and more lib
erated himself from all creeds, he humorously affected
an abiding belief in hell, and similarly contended for
the eternal punishment of the wicked. He was of a re
ligious nature, and he was very reverent of other peo
ple's religious feelings. He expressed a special tol
erance for my own inherited faith, no doubt because
Mrs. Lowell was also a Swedenborgian ; but I do not
think he was interested in it, and I suspect that all re
ligious formulations bored him. In his earlier poems
are many intimations and affirmations of belief in an
overruling providence, and especially in the God who
declares vengeance His and will repay men for their
evil deeds, and will right the weak against the strong.
I think he never quite lost this, though when, in the last
years of his life, I asked him if he believed there was
a moral government of the universe, he answered grave
ly and with a sort of pain, The scale was so vast, and
we saw such a little part of it.
As to the notion of a life after death, I never had
any direct or indirect expression from him ; but I in
cline to the opinion that his hold upon this weakened
with his years, as it is sadly apt to do with men who
have read much and thought much: they have appar
ently exhausted their potentialities of psychological
life. Mystical Lowell was, as every poet must be, but
I do not think lie liked mystery. One morning he
told me that when he came home the night before he
had seen the Doppelgdnger of one of his household:
though, as he joked, he was not in a state to see double.
228
STUDIES OF LOWELL
He then said he used often to see people's Doppel-
gdnger; at another time, as to ghosts, he said, He was
like Coleridge: he had seen too many of 'em. Lest
any weaker brethren should be caused to offend by the
restricted oath which I have reported him using in
a moment of transport it may be best to note here that
I never heard him use any other imprecation, and this
one seldom.
Any grossness of speech was inconceivable of him;
now and then, but only very rarely, the human nature
of some story " unmeet for ladies " was too much for
his sense of humor, and overcame him with amuse
ment which he was willing to impart, and did impart,
but so that mainly the human nature of it reached you.
In this he was like the other great Cambridge men,
though he was opener than the others to contact with
the commoner life. He keenly delighted in every na
tive and novel turn of phrase, and he would not under
value a vital word or a notion picked up out of the
road even if it had some dirt sticking to it.
He kept as close to the common life as a man of his
patrician instincts and cloistered habits could. I
could go to him with any new find about it and be sure
of delighting him; after I began making my involun
tary and all but unconscious studies of Yankee charac
ter, especially in the country, he was always glad to talk
them over with me. Still, when I had discovered a
new accent or turn of speech in the fields he had cul
tivated, I was aware of a subtle grudge mingling with
his pleasure; but this was after all less envy than a
fine regret.
At the time I speak of there was certainly nothing
in Lowell's dress or bearing that would have kept the
common life aloof from him, if that life were not al
ways too proud to make advances to any one. In
229
L1TEEARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
this retrospect, I see him in the sack coat and rough
suit which he wore upon all out-door occasions, with
heavy shoes, and a round hat. I never saw him with
a high hat on till he came home after his diplomatic
stay in London; then he had become rather rigorously
correct in his costume, and as conventional as he had
formerly been indifferent. In both epochs he was apt
to be gloved, and the strong, broad hands, which left
the sensation of their vigor for some time after they
had clasped yours, were notably white. At the earlier
period, he still wore his auburn hair somewhat long;
it was darker than his beard, which was branching and
full, and more straw-colored than auburn, as were his
thick eyebrows; neither hair nor beard was then
touched with gray, as I now remember. When he un
covered, his straight, wide, white forehead showed itself
one of the most beautiful that could be ; his eyes were
gay with humor, and alert with all intelligence. He
had an enchanting smile, a laugh that was full of
friendly joyousness, and a voice that was exquisite
music. Everything about him expressed his strenu
ous physical condition: he would not wear an overcoat
in the coldest Cambridge weather; at all times he
moved vigorously, and walked with a quick step, lift
ing his feet well from the ground.
VII
It gives me a pleasure which I am afraid I cannot
impart, to linger in this effort to materialize his pres
ence from the fading memories of the past. I am
afraid I can as little impart a due sense of what he
spiritually was to my knowledge. It avails nothing
for me to say that I think no man of my years and
desert had ever so true and constant a friend. He
230
was both younger and older than I by insomuch as he
was a poet through and through, and had been out of
college before I was born. But he had already come
to the age of self-distrust when a man likes to take
counsel with his juniors as with his elders, and fancies
he can correct his perspective by the test of their fresh
er vision. Besides, Lowell was most simply and pa-,
thetically reluctant to part with youth, and was will
ing to cling to it wherever he found it. He could not
in any wise bear to be left out. When Mr. Bret Harte
came to Cambridge, and the talk was all of the brill
iant character - poems with which he had then first
dazzled the world, Lowell casually said, with a most
touching, however ungrounded sense of obsolescence,
He could remember when the Bigloiu Papers were all
the talk. I need not declare that there was nothing
ungenerous in that. He was only too ready to hand
down his laurels to a younger man; but he wished to
do it himself. Through the modesty that is always
a quality of such a nature, he was magnanimously
sensitive to the appearance of fading interest; he could
not take it otherwise than as a proof of his fading
power. I had a curious hint of this when one year in
making up the prospectus of the Magazine for the next,
I omitted his name because I had nothing special to
promise from him, and because I was half ashamed to
be always flourishing it in the eyes of the public. " I
see that you have dropped me this year/' he wrote, and
I could see that it had hurt, and I knew that he was
glad to believe the truth when I told him.
He did not care so much for popularity as for the
praise of his friends. If he liked you he wished you
not only to like what he wrote, but to say so. He was
himself most cordial in his recognition of the things
that pleased him. What happened to me from him,
231
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
happened to others, and I am only describing his com
mon habit when I say that nothing I did to his liking
failed to bring me a spoken or oftener a written ac
knowledgment. This continued to the latest years of
his life when the effort even to give such pleasure must
have cost him a physical pang.
He was of a very catholic taste ; and he \vas apt to be
carried away by a little touch of life or humor, and to
overvalue the piece in which he found it; but mainly
his judgments of letters and men were just. One of
the dangers of scholarship was a peculiar danger
in the Cambridge keeping, but Lowell was almost as
averse as Longfellow from contempt. He could snub,
and pitilessly, where he thought there was presump
tion and apparently sometimes merely because he was
in the mood; but I cannot remember ever to have
heard him sneer. He was often wonderfully patient
of tiresome people, and sometimes celestially insensi
ble to vulgarity. In spite of his reserve, he really
wished people to like him; he was keenly alive to
neighborly good-will or ill-will; and when there was
a question of widening Elmwood avenue by taking part
of his grounds, he was keenly hurt by hearing that
some one who lived near him had said he hoped the
city would cut down Lowell's elms: his English elms,
which his father had planted, and with which he was
himself almost one blood !
VIII
In the period of which I am speaking, Lowell was
constantly writing and pretty constantly printing,
though still the superstition held that he was an idle
man. To this time belongs the publication of some of
his finest poems, if not their inception: there were cases
.232
STUDIES OF LOWELL
in which their inception dated far back, even to ten or
twenty years. He wrote his poems at a heat, and the
manuscript which came to me for the magazine was
usually the first draft, very little corrected. But if the
cold fit took him quickly it might hold him so fast that
he would leave the poem in abeyance till he could slow
ly live back to a liking for it.
The most of his best prose belongs to the time be
tween 1866 and 1874, and to this time we owe the
several volumes of essays and criticisms called Among
My Books and My Study Windows. He wished to
name these more soberly, but at the urgence of his pub
lishers he gave them titles which they thought would be
attractive to the public, though he felt that they took
from the dignity of his work. He was not a good busi
ness man in a literary way, he submitted to others' judg
ment in all such matters. I doubt if he ever put a price
upon anything he sold, and I dare say he was usually
surprised at the largeness of the price paid him; but
sometimes if his need was for a larger sum, he thought
it too little, without reference to former payments.
This happened with a long poem in the Atlantic., which
I had urged the counting-room authorities to deal hand
somely with him for. I did not know how many hun
dred they gave him, and when I met him I ventured to
express the hope that the publishers had done their part.
He held up four fingers, " Quattro" he said in Italian,
and then added with a disappointment which he tried
to smile away, " I thought they might have made it
cinque"
Between me and me I thought quattro very well, but
probably Lowell had in mind some end which cinque
would have fitted better. It was pretty sure to be an
unselfish end, a pleasure to some one dear to him, a gift
that he had wished to make. Long afterwards when I
233
had been the means of getting him cinque for a poem
one-tenth the length, he spoke of the payment to me.
" It came very handily ; I had been wanting to give
a watch."
I do not believe at any time Lowell was able to deal
with money
" Like wealthy men, not knowing what they give."
More probably he felt a sacredness in the money got by
literature, which the literary man never quite rids him
self of, even when he is not a poet, and which made him
wish to dedicate it to something finer than the every
day uses. He lived very quietly, but he had by no
means more than he needed to live upon, and at that
time he had pecuniary losses. He was writing hard,
and was doing full work in his Harvard professorship,
and he was so far dependent upon his salary, that he
felt its absence for the year he went abroad. I do not
know quite how to express my sense of something un
worldly, of something almost womanlike in his relation
to money.
He was not only generous of money, but he was gen
erous of himself, when he thought he could be of use,
or merely of encouragement. He came all the way into
Boston to hear certain lectures of mine on the Italian
poets, which he could not have found either edifying or
amusing, that he might testify his interest in me, and
show other people that they were worth coming to. He
would go carefully over a poem with me, word by word,
and criticise every turn of phrase, and after all be
magnanimously tolerant of my sticking to phrasings
that he disliked. In a certain line :
" The silvern chords of the piano trembled,"
he objected to silvern. Why not silver ? I alleged
234
STUDIES OF LOWELL
leathern, golden, and like adjectives in defence of my
word; but still he found an affectation in it, and suf
fered it to stand with extreme reluctance. Another line
of another piece —
" And what she would, would rather that she would not " —
he would by no means suffer. He said that the stress
falling on the last word made it " public-school Eng
lish," and he mocked it with the answer a maid had
lately given him when he asked if the master of the
house was at home. She said, " jSTo, sir, he is not,"
when she ought to have said " !N"o, sir, he isn't." He
was appeased when I came back the next day with the
stanza amended so that the verse could read —
" And what she would, would rather she would not so " —
but I fancy he never quite forgave my word silvern.
Yet, he professed not to have prejudices in such mat
ters, but to use any word that would serve his turn,
without wincing; and he certainly did use and defend
words, as undisprivacwd and disnatured, that made
others wince.
He was otherwise such a stickler for the best diction
that he would not have had me use slovenly vernacular
even in the dialogue in my stories : my characters must
not say they wanted to do so and so, but wished, and the
like. In a copy of one of my books which I found him
reading, I saw he had corrected my erring Western
woulds and shoulds; as he grew old he was less and less
able to restrain himself from setting people right to their
faces. Once, in the vast area of my ignorance, he speci
fied my small acquaintance with a certain period of Eng
lish poetry, saying, " You're rather shady, there, old fel
low." But he would not have had me too learned, hold
ing that he had himself been hurt for literature by his
scholarship.
235
LITERARY FRIENDS AND 'ACQUAINTANCE
His patience in analyzing my work with me might
have been the easy effort of his habit of teaching; and
his willingness to give himself and his own was no
doubt more signally attested in his asking a brother man
of letters who wished to work up a subject in the col
lege library, to stay a fortnight in his house, and to
share his study, his beloved study, with him. This must
truly have cost him dear, as any author of fixed habits
will understand. Happily the man of letters was a
good fellow, and knew how to prize the favor done him,
but if he had been otherwise, it would have been the
same to Lowell. He not only endured, but did many
things for the weaker brethren, which were amusing
enough to one in the secret of his inward revolt. Yet
in these things he was considerate also of the editor
whom he might have made the sharer of his self-sacri
fice, and he seldom offered me manuscripts for others.
The only real burden of the kind that he put upon me
was the diary of a Virginian who had travelled in New
England during the early thirties, and had set down his
impressions of men and manners there. It began
charmingly, and went on very well under Lowell's dis
creet pruning, but after a while he seemed to fall in
love with the character of the diarist so much that he
could not bear to cut anything.
IX
He had a great tenderness for the broken and ruined
South, whose sins he felt that he had had his share in
visiting upon her, and he was willing to do what he
could to ease her sorrows in the case of any particular
Southerner. He could not help looking askance upon
the dramatic shows of retribution which some of the
Northern politicians were working, but with all his
misgivings he continued to act with the Republican
23G
STUDIES OF LOWELL
party until after the election of Hayes; he was away
from the country during the Garh'eld campaign. He
was in fact one of the Massachusetts electors chosen by
the Republican majority in 1876, and in that most
painful hour when there was question of the policy and
justice of counting Hayes in for the presidency, it was
suggested by some of Lowell's friends that he should
use the original right of the electors under the consti
tution, and vote for Tilden, whom one vote would have
chosen president over Hayes. After he had cast his
vote for Hayes, he quietly referred to the matter one
day, in the moment of lighting his pipe, with perhaps
the faintest trace of indignation in his tone. He said
that whatever the first intent of the constitution was,
usage had made the presidential electors strictly the
instruments of the party which chose them, and that for
him to have voted for Tilden when he had been chosen
to vote for Hayes would have been an act of bad faith.
He would have resumed for me all the old kind
ness of our relations before the recent year of his ab
sence, but this had inevitably worked a little estrange
ment. He had at least lost the habit of me, and that
says much in such matters. He was not so perfectly
at rest in the Cambridge environment ; in certain inde
finable ways it did not so entirely suffice him, though
he would have been then and always the last to allow
this. I imagine his friends realized more than he, that
certain delicate but vital filaments of attachment had
frayed and parted in alien air, and left him heart-loose
as he had not been before.
I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the
election of Hayes that he might be offered some place
abroad, but it certainly crossed the minds of some of
his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for
myself alone when I used a family connection with the
President, very early in his term, to let him know that
I believed Lowell would accept a diplomatic mission. 1
could assure him that I was writing wholly without
Lowell's privity or authority, and I got back such a
letter as I could wish in its delicate sense of the situa
tion. The President said that he had already thought
of offering Lowell something, and he gave me the
pleasure, a pleasure beyond any other I could imagine,
of asking Lowell whether he wrould accept the mission
to Austria. I lost no time carrying his letter to Elm-
wood, where I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner.
lie saw me at the threshold, and called to me through
the open door to come in, arid I handed him the letter,
and sat down at table while he ran it through. When
he had read it, he gave a quick " Ah !" and threw it
over the length of the table to Mrs. Lowell. She read
it in a smiling and loyal reticence, as if she would not
say one word of all she might wish to say in urging his
acceptance, though I could see that she was intensely
eager for it. The whole situation was of a perfect ISTew
England character in its tacit significance; after Low
ell had taken his coffee we turned into his study with
out further allusion to the matter.
A day or two later he came to my house to say that
he could not accept the Austrian mission, and to ask
me to tell the President so for him, and make his
acknowledgments, which he would also write himself.
He remained talking a little while of other things, and
when he rose to go, he said with a sigh of vague reluc
tance, " I should like to see a play of Calderon," as if
it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could
still be fulfilled. " Upon this hint I acted," and in due
time it was found in Washington, that the gentleman
who had been offered the Spanish mission would as lief
go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid.
238
STUDIES OF LOWELL
X
When we met in London, some years later, he
came almost every afternoon to my lodging, and
the story of our old-time Cambridge walks began
again in London phrases. There were not the vacant
lots and outlying fields of his native place, but we made
shift with the vast, simple parks, and we walked on the
grass as we could not have done in an American park,
and were glad to feel the earth under our feet. I said
how much it was like those earlier tramps; and that
pleased him, for he wished, whenever a thing delighted
him, to find a Cambridge quality in it.
But he was in love with everything English, and
was determined I should be so too, beginning with the
English weather, which in summer cannot be over
praised. He carried, of course, an umbrella, but he
would not put it up in the light showers that caught us
at times, saying that the English rain never wetted you.
The thick short turf delighted him; he would scarcely
allow that the trees were the worse for foliage blighted
by a vile easterly storm in the spring of that year. The
tender air, the delicate veils that the moisture in it
cast about all objects at the least remove, the soft colors
of the flowers, the dull blue of the low sky showing
through the rifts of the dirty white clouds, the hover
ing pall of London smoke, were all dear to him, and he
was anxious that I should not lose anything of their
charm.
He was anxious that I should not miss the value of
anything in England, and while he volunteered that the
aristocracy had the corruptions of aristocracies every
where, he insisted upon my respectful interest in it be
cause it was so historical. Perhaps there was a touch of
irony in this demand, but it is certain that he was very
239
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
happy in England. He bad come of the age when a
man likes smooth, warm keeping, in which he need
make no struggle for his comfort; disciplined and ob
sequious service; society, perfectly ascertained within
the larger society which we call civilization ; and in an
alien environment, for which be was in no wise respon
sible, he could have these without a pang of the self-
reproach which at home makes a man unhappy amidst
his luxuries, when he considers their cost to others.
He had a position which forbade thought of unfairness
in the conditions; he must not wake because of the
slave, it was his duty to sleep. Besides, at that time
Lowell needed all the rest he could get, for he had lately
passed through trials such as break the strength of men,
arid bow them with premature age. He was living alone
in his little house in Lowndes Square, and Mrs. Lowell
was in the country, slowly recovering from the effects
of the terrible typhus which she had barely survived in
Madrid. He was yet so near the anguish of that ex
perience that he told me he had still in his nerves the
expectation of a certain agonized cry from her which
used to rend them. But he said he had adjusted him
self to this, and he wont on to speak with a patience
which was more affecting in him than in men of more
phlegmatic temperament, of how we were able to adjust
ourselves to all our trials and to the constant presence
of pain. He said he was never free of a certain dis
tress, which was often a sharp pang, in one of his
shoulders, but his physique had established such rela
tions with it that, though he was never unconscious of
it, he was able to endure it without a recognition of it
as suffering.
He seemed to me, however, very well, and at his age
of sixty-three, I could not see that he was less alert and
vigorous than lie was when I first knew him in Cam-
240
STUDIES OF LOWELL
bridge. He had the same brisk, light step, and though
his beard was well whitened and his auburn hair had
grown ashen through the red, his face had the fresh
ness and his eyes the clearness of a young man's. T
suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinking
about his years ; or perhaps in contact with those great,
insenescent Englishmen, he could not feel himself old.
At any rate he did not once speak of age, as he used to
do ten years earlier, and I, then half through my forties,
was still " You young dog " to him. It was a bright
and cheerful renewal of the early kindliness between
us, on which indeed there had never been a shadow, ex
cept such as distance throws. He wished apparently to
do everything he could to assure us of his personal in
terest ; and we were amused to find him nervously ap
prehensive of any purpose, such as was far from us, to
profit by him officially. He betrayed a distinct relief
when he found we were not going to come upon him
even for admissions to the houses of parliament, which
we were to see by means of an English acquaintance.
Tie had not perhaps found some other fellow-citizens so
considerate ; he dreaded the half-duties of his place,
like presentations to the queen, and complained of the
cheap ambitions he had to gratify in that way.
He was so eager to have me like England in every
way, and seemed so fond of the English, that I thought
it best to ask him whether he minded my quoting, in a
paper about Lexington, which I was just then going
to print in a London magazine, some humorous lines
of his expressing the mounting satisfaction of an imag
inary Yankee story-teller who has the old fight terminate
in Lord Percy's coming
" To hammer stone for life in Concord jail."
It had occurred to me that it might possibly em-
241
L1TEKAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
barrass him to have this patriotic picture presented to
a public which could not take our Fourth of July
pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did
afterwards quite for literary reasons. He said, ISTo,
let it stand, and let them make the worst of it; and I
fancy that much of his success with a people who are
not gingerly with other people's sensibilities came from
the frankness with which he trampled on their preju
dice when he chose. He said he always told them,
when there was question of such things, that the best
society he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massa
chusetts. - He contended that the best English was
spoken there ; and so it was, when he spoke it.
We were in London out of the season, and he was
sorry that he could not have me meet some titles who
he declared had found pleasure in my books ; when we
returned from Italy in the following June, he was
prompt to do me this honor. I dare say he wished me
to feel it to its last implication, and I did my best, but
there was nothing in the evening I enjoyed so much as
his coming up to Mrs. Lowell, at the close, when there
was only a title or two left, and saying to her as he
would have said to her at Elmwood, where she would
have personally planned it, " Fanny, that was a fine
dinner you gave us." Of course, this was in a tender
burlesque; but it remains the supreme impression of
what seemed to me a cloudlessly happy period for
Lowell. His wife was quite recovered of her long suf
fering, and was again at the head of his house, sharing
in his pleasures, and enjoying his successes for his sake ;
successes so great that people spoke of him seriously,
as " an addition to society " in London, where one man
more or less seemed like a drop in the sea. She was a
woman perfectly of the New England type and tradi
tion : almost repellantly shy at first, and almost glacially
242
STUDIES OF LOWELL
cold with new acquaintance, but afterwards very sweet
and cordial. She was of a dark beauty with a regular
face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an ideal
manner towards her, and of an admiration which deli
cately travestied itself and which she knew how to re
ceive with smiling irony. After her death, which oc
curred while he was still in England, he never spoke of
her to me, though before that he used to be always
bringing her name in, with a young lover-like fondness.
XI
In the hurry of the London season I did not see so
much of Lowell on our second sojourn as on our first,
but once when we were alone in his study there was
a return to the terms of the old meetings in Cambridge.
He smoked his pipe, and sat by his fire and philoso
phized ; and but for the great London sea swirling out
side and bursting through our shelter, and dashing him
with notes that must be instantly answered, it was a
very fair image of the past. He wanted to tell me
about his coachman whom he had got at on his human
side with great liking and amusement, and there was
a patient gentleness in his manner with the footman
who had to keep coming in upon him with those notes
which was like the echo of his young faith in the
equality of men. But he always distinguished between
the simple unconscious equality of the ordinary Ameri
can and its assumption by a foreigner. He said he did
not mind such an American's coming into his house
with his hat on ; but if a German or Englishman did it,
he wanted to knock it off. He was apt to be rather
punctilious in his shows of deference towards others,
and at one time he practised removing his own hat when
he went into shops in Cambridge. It must have mysti-
" 243
L1TEKAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
fied the Cambridge salesmen, and I doubt if he kept
it up.
With reference to the doctrine of his young poetry,
the fierce and the tender humanity of his storm and
stress period, I fancy a kind of baffle in Lowell, which
I should not perhaps find it easy to prove. I never
knew him by word or hint to renounce this doctrine,
but he could not come to seventy years without having
seen many high hopes fade, and known many inspired
prophecies fail. When we have done our best to make
the world over, we are apt to be dismayed by finding it
in much the old shape. As he said of the moral govern
ment of the universe, the scale is so vast, and a little
difference, a little change for the better, is scarcely per
ceptible to the eager consciousness of the wholesale re
former. But with whatever sense of disappointment,
of doubt as to his own deeds for truer freedom and for
better conditions I believe his sympathy was still with
those who had some heart for hoping and striving. I
am sure that though he did not agree with me in some
of my own later notions for the redemption of the race,
he did not like me the less but rather the more because
(to my own great surprise I confess) I had now and
then the courage of my convictions, both literary and
social.
He was probably most at odds with me in regard to
my theories of fiction, though he persisted in declaring
his pleasure in my own fiction. He was in fact, by nat
ure and tradition, thoroughly romantic, and he could
not or would not suffer realism in any but a friend. He
steadfastly refused even to read the Russian masters,
to his immense loss, as I tried to persuade him, and
even among the modern Spaniards, for whom he might
have had a sort of personal kindness from his love of
Cervantes, he chose one for his praise the least worthy
244
STUDIES OF LOWELL
of it, and bore me down with his heavier metal in argu
ment when I opposed to Alarcon's f actitiousness the de
lightful genuineness of Valdes. Ibsen, with all the
Norwegians, he put far from him; he would no more
know them than the Kussians; the French naturalists
he abhorred. I thought him all wrong, but you do not
try improving your elders when they have come to
three score and ten years, and I would rather have had
his affection unbroken by our difference of opinion
than a perfect agreement. Where he even imagined
that this difference could work rne harm, he was anxious
to have me know that he meant me none ; and he was at
the trouble to write me a letter when a Boston paper
had perverted its report of what he said in a public
lecture to my disadvantage, and to assure me that he
had not me in mind. When once he had given his lik
ing, he could not bear that any shadow of change should
seem to have come upon him. lie had a most beautiful
and endearing ideal of friendship; he desired to af
firm it and to reaffirm it as often as occasion offered, and
if occasion did not offer, he made occasion. It did not
matter what you said or did that contraried him; if
he thought he had essentially divined you, you were
still the same : and on his part he was by no means ex
acting of equal demonstration, but seemed not even to
wish it.
XII
'After he was replaced at London by a minister more
immediately representative of the Democratic adminis
tration, he came home. lie made a brave show of not
caring to have remained away, but in truth he had be
come very fond of England, where he had made so many
friends, and where the distinction he had, in that com
fortably padded environment, was .so agreeable to him.
245
LITEKAEY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
It would have been like him to have secretly hoped that
the new President might keep him in London, but he
never betrayed any ignoble disappointment, and he
would not join in any blame of him. At our first meet
ing after he came home he spoke of the movement which
had made Mr. Cleveland president, and said he sup
posed that if he had been here, he should have been in
it. All his friends were, he added, a little helplessly;
but he seemed not to dislike my saying I knew one of
his friends who was not : in fact, as I have told, he never
disliked a plump difference — unless he disliked the
differer.
For several years he went back to England every sum
mer, and it was not until he took up his abode at Elm-
wood again that he spent a whole year at home. One
winter he passed at his sister's home in Boston, but
mostly he lived with his daughter at Southborough. I
have heard a story of his going to Elmwood soon after
his return in 1885, and sitting down in his old study,
where he declared with tears that the place was full of
ghosts. But four or five years later it was well for
family reasons that he should live there ; and about the
same time it happened that I had taken a house for the
summer in his neighborhood. He came to see me, and
to assure me, in all tacit forms of his sympathy in a
sorrow for which there could be no help ; but it was not
possible that the old intimate relations should be re
sumed. The affection \vas there, as much on his side
as on mine, I believe ; but he was now an old man and I
was an elderly man, and we could not, without insincer
ity, approach each other in the things that had drawn
us together in earlier and happier years. His course
was run ; my own, in which he had taken such a gener
ous pleasure, could scarcely move his jaded interest.
His life, so far as it remained to him, had renewed it-
246
STUDIES OF LOWELL
self in other air; the later friendships beyond seas suf
ficed him, and were without the pang, without the ef
fort that must attend the knitting up of frayed ties
here.
He could never have been anything but American, if
he had tried, and he certainly never tried; but he cer
tainly did not return to the outward simplicities of his
life as I first knew it. There was no more round-hat-
and-sack-coat business for him; he wore a frock and a
high hat, and whatever else was rather like London
than Cambridge ; I do not know but drab gaiters some
times added to the effect of a gentleman of the old
school which he now produced upon the witness. Some
fastidiousnesses showed themselves in him, which were
not so surprising. He complained of the American
lower class manner; the conductor and cabman would
be kind to you but they would not be respectful, and
he could not see the fun of this in the old way. Early
in our acquaintance he rather stupified me by saying,
" I like you because you don't put your hands on me,"
and I heard of his consenting to some sort of reception
in those last years, " Yes, if they won't shake hands."
Ever since his visit to Rome in 1875 he had let his
heavy mustache grow long till it dropped below the cor
ners of his beard, which was now almost white ; his face
had lost the ruddy hue so characteristic of him. I
fancy he was then ailing with premonitions of the dis
order which a few years later proved mortal, but he
still bore himself with sufficient vigor, and he walked
the distance between his house and mine, though once
when I missed his visit the family reported that after
he came in he sat a long time with scarcely a word, as
if too weary to talk. That winter, I went into Boston
to live, and I saw him only at infrequent intervals,
when I could go out to Elmwood. At such times I
247
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
found him sitting in the room which was formerly the
drawing-room, but which had been joined with his study
by taking away the partitions beside the heavy mass of
the old colonial chimney. lie told me that when he
was a new-born babe, the nurse had carried him round
this chimney, for luck, and now in front of the same
hearth, the white old man stretched himself in an easy-
chair, with his writing-pad on his knees and his books
on the table at his elbow, and was willing to be en
treated not to rise. I remember the sun used to come
in at the eastern windows full pour, and bathe the air
in its warmth.
He always hailed me gayly, and if I found him with
letters newly come from England, as I sometimes did,
he glowed and sparkled with fresh life. He wanted
to read passages from those letters, he wanted to talk
about their writers, and to make me feel their worth
and charm as he did. He still dreamed of going back
to England the next summer, but that was not to be.
One day he received me not less gayly than usual, but
with a certain excitement, and began to tell me about
an odd experience he had had, not at all painful, but
wrhich had very much mystified him. He had since
seen the doctor, and the doctor had assured him that
there was nothing alarming in what had happened, and
in recalling this assurance, he began to look at the hu
morous aspects of the case, and to make some jokes
about it. He wished to talk of it, as men do of their
maladies, and very fully, and I gave him such proof of
my interest as even inviting him to talk of it would
convey. In spite of the doctor's assurance, and his
joyful acceptance of it, I doubt if at the bottom of his
heart there was not the stir of an uneasy misgiving;
but he had not for a long time shown himself so cheer
ful.
248
STUDIES OF LOWELL
It was the beginning of the end. He recovered and
relapsed, and recovered again ; but never for long. Late
in the spring I came out, and he had me stay to dinner,
which was somehow as it used to be at two o'clock ; and
after dinner we went out on his lawn. He got a long-
handled spud, and tried to grub up some dandelions
which he found in his turf, but after a moment or two
he threw it down, and put his hand upon his back with
a groan. I did not see him again till I came out to
take leave of him before going away for the summer,
and then I found him sitting on the little porch in a
western corner of his house, with a volume of Scott
closed upon his finger. There were some other people,
and our meeting was with the constraint of their pres
ence. It was natural in nothing so much as his saying
very significantly to me, as if he knew of my heresies
concerning Scott, and would have me know he did not
approve of them, that there was nothing he now found
so much pleasure in as Scott's novels. Another friend,
equally heretical, was by, but neither of us attempted
to gainsay him. Lowell talked very little, but he told
of having been a walk to Beaver Brook, and of having
wished to jump from one stone to another in the stream,
and of having had to give it up. He said, without com
pleting the sentence, If it had come to that with him !
Then he fell silent again; and with some vain talk of
seeing him when I came back in the fall, I went away
sick at heart. I was not to see him again, and I shall
not look upon his like.
I am aware that I have here shown him from this
point and from that in a series of sketches which per
haps collectively impart, but do not assemble his per
sonality in one impression. He did not, indeed, make
one impression upon me, but a thousand impressions,
which I should seek in vain to embody in a single pre-
249
LITERAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
sentment. What I have cloudily before me is the
vision of a very lofty and simple soul, perplexed, and
as it were surprised and even dismayed at the complex
ity of the effects from motives so single in it, but es
caping always to a clear expression of what was noblest
and loveliest in itself at the supreme moments, in the
divine exigencies. I believe neither in heroes nor in
saints ; but I believe in great and good men, for I have
known them, and among such men Lowell was of the
richest nature I have known. His nature was not al
ways serene or pellucid ; it was sometimes roiled by the
currents that counter and cross in all of us ; but it was
without the least alloy of insincerity, and it was never
darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear. His genius
was an instrument that responded in affluent harmony
to the power that made him a humorist and that made
him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quite either
alone.
part Bfgbtb
T3EING the wholly literary spirit I was when I went
-*-^ to make my home in Cambridge, I do not see how
I could well have been more content if I had found
myself in the Elysian Fields with an agreeable eternity
before me. At twenty-nine, indeed, one is practically im
mortal, and at that age, time had for me the effect of an
eternity in which I had nothing to do but to read books
and dream of writing them, in the overflow of endless
hours from my work with the manuscripts, critical
notices, and proofs of the Atlantic Monthly. As for the
social environment I should have been puzzled if given
my choice among the elect of all the ages, to find poets
and scholars more to my mind than those still in the
flesh at Cambridge in the early afternoon of the nine
teenth century. They are now nearly all dead, and I
can speak of them in the freedom which is death's
doubtful favor to the survivor; but if they were still
alive I could say little to their offence, unless their mod
esty was hurt with my praise.
One of the first and truest of our Cambridge friends
was that exquisite intelligence, who, in a world where
so many people are grotesquely miscalled, was most
fitly named; for no man ever kept here more perfectly
251
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
and purely the heart of such as the kingdom of heaven
is of than Francis J. Child. He was then in his prime,
and I like to recall the outward image which expressed
the inner man as happily as his name. He was of low
stature and of an inclination which never became stout
ness ; but what you most saw when you saw him was his
face of consummate refinement : very regular, with eyes
always glassed by gold-rimmed spectacles, a straight,
short, most sensitive nose, and a beautiful mouth with
the sweetest smile mouth ever wore, and that was as
wise and shrewd as it was sweet. In a time when ev
ery other man was more or less bearded he was clean
shaven, and of a delightful freshness of coloring which
his thick sunny hair, clustering upon his head in close
rings, admirably set off. I believe he never became
gray, and the last time I saw him, though he wa.'i
broken then with years and pain, his face had still tho
brightness of his inextinguishable youth.
It is well known how great was Professor Child's
scholarship in the branches of his Harvard work; and
how especially, how uniquely, effective it was in the
study of English and Scottish balladry to which he gave
so many years of his life. He was a poet in his nature,
and he wrought with passion as well as knowledge in
the achievement of as monumental a task as any Ameri
can has performed, But he might have been indefinite
ly less than he was in any intellectual wise, and yet
been precious to those who knew him for the gentleness
and the goodness which in him were protected from
misconception by a final dignity as delicate and as in
violable as that of Longfellow himself.
We were still much less than a year from our life in
Venice, when he came to see us in Cambridge, and in
the Italian interest which then commended us to so
many fine spirits among our neighbors we found our-
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CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
selves at the beginning of a life-long friendship with
him. I was known to him only by my letters from
Venice, which afterwards became Venetian Life,
and by a bit of devotional verse which he had asked
to include in a collection he was making, but he imme
diately gave us the freedom of his heart, which after
wards was never withdrawn. In due time he imagined
a home-school, to which our little one was asked, and
she had her first lessons with his own daughter under
his roof. These things drew us closer together, and he
was willing to be still nearer to me in any time of
trouble. At one such time when the shadow which
must some time darken every door, hovered at ours, he
had the strength to make me face it and try to realize,
while it was still there, that it was not cruel and not
evil. It passed, for that time, but the sense of his help
remained ; and in my own case I can testify of the
potent tenderness which all who knew him must have
known in him. But in bearing my witness I feel ac
cused, almost as if he were present, by his fastidious
reluctance from any recognition of his helpfulness.
When this came in the form of gratitude taking credit
to itself in a pose which reflected honor upon him as
the architect of greatness, he was delightfully impa
tient of it, and he was most amusingly dramatic in re
producing the consciousness of certain ineffectual alum
ni who used to overwhelm him at Commencement sol
emnities with some such pompous acknowledgment as,
" Professor Child, all that I have become, sir, I owe to
your influence in my college career." He did, with de
licious mockery, the old-fashioned intellectual poseurs
among the students, who used to walk the groves of Har
vard with bent head, and the left arm crossing the back,
while the other lodged its hand in the breast of the high-
buttoned frock-coat ; and I could fancy that his classes
253
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
in college did not form the sunniest exposure for young
folly and vanity. I know that he was intolerant of any
manner of insincerity, and no flattery could take him
off his guard. I have seen him meet this with a cut
ting phrase of rejection, and no man was more apt at
snubbing the patronage that offers itself at times to all
men. 13ut mostly he wished to do people pleasure, and
he seemed always to be studying how to do it; as for
need, I am sure that worthy and unworthy want had
alike the way to his heart.
Children were always his friends, and they repaid
with adoration the affection which he divided with them
and with his flowers. I recall him in no moments so
characteristic as those he spent in making the little ones
laugh out of their hearts at his drolling, some festive
evening in his house, and those he gave to sharing with
you his joy in his gardening. This, I believe, began
with violets, and it went on to roses, which he grew in
a splendor and profusion impossible to any but a true
lover with a genuine gift for them. Like Lowell, he
spent his summers in Cambridge, and in the afternoon,
you could find him digging or pruning among his roses
with an ardor which few caprices of the weather could
interrupt. He would lift himself from their ranks,
which he scarcely over-topped, as you came up the foot
way to his door, and peer purblindly across at you. If
he knew you at once, he traversed the nodding and
swaying bushes, to give you the hand free of the trowel
or knife ; or if you got indoors unseen by him he would
come in holding towards you some exquisite blossom
that weighed down the tip of its long stem with a suc
cession of hospitable obeisances.
He graced with unaffected poetry a life of as hard
study, of as hard work, and as varied achievement as
any I have known or read of ; and he played with gifts
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CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
and acquirements such as in no great measure have
made reputations. He had a rare and lovely humor
which could amuse itself both in English and Italian
with such an airy burletta as " II Pesceballo " (he wrote
it in Metastasian Italian, and Lowell put it in libretto
English) ; he had a critical sense as sound as it was
subtle in all literature; and whatever he wrote he im
bued with the charm of a style finely personal to him
self. His learning in the line of his Harvard teaching
included an early English scholarship unrivalled in his
time, and his researches in ballad literature left no cor
ner of it untouched. I fancy this part of his study
was peculiarly pleasant to him; for he loved simple
and natural things, and the beauty which he found
nearest life. At least he scorned the pedantic affecta
tions of literary superiority ; and he used to quote with
joyous laughter the swelling exclamation of an Italian
critic who proposed to leave the summits of polite
learning for a moment, with the cry, " Scendiamo fra
il popolo!" (Let us go down among the people.)
II
Of course it was only so hard worked a man who
could take thought and trouble for another. lie once
took thought for me at a time when it was very im
portant to me, and when he took the trouble to secure
for me an engagement to deliver that course of Lowell
lectures in Boston, which I have said Lowell had the
courage to go in town to hear. I do not remember
whether Professor Child was equal to so much, but he
would have been if it were necessary; and I rather re
joice now in the belief that he did not seek quite that
martyrdom.
He had done more than enough for me, but he had
Of.fC
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
done only what he was always willing to do for others.
In the form of a favor to himself he brought into my
life the great happiness of intimately knowing Hjalmar
Jljorth Boyesen, whom he had found one summer day
among the shelves in the Harvard library, and found to
be a poet and an intending novelist. I do not remem
ber now just how this fact imparted itself to the pro
fessor, but literature is of easily cultivated confidence
in youth, and possibly the revelation was spontaneous.
At any rate, as a susceptible young editor, I was asked
to meet my potential contributor at the professor's two
o'clock dinner, and when we came to coffee in the
study, Boyesen took from the pocket nearest his heart
a chapter of Gunnar, and read it to us.
Perhaps the good professor who brought us together
had plotted to have both novel and novelist make their
impression at once upon the youthful sub-editor ; but at
any rate they did not fail of an effect. I believe it was
that chapter where Gunnar and Ragnhild dance and
sing a stev together, for I associate with that far happy
time the rich mellow tones of the poet's voice in the
poet's verse. These were most characteristic of him,
and it is as if I might put my ear against the ethereal
wall beyond which he is rapt and hear them yet.
Our meeting was on a lovely afternoon of summer,
and the odor of the professor's roses stole in at the open
windows, and became part of the gentle event. Boye
sen walked home with me, and for a fortnight after I
think we parted only to dream of the literature which
we poured out upon each other in every waking mo
ment. I had just learned to know Bjornson's stories,
and Boyesen told me of his poetry and of his drama,
which in even measure embodied the great ISTorse liter
ary movement, and filled me with the wonder and de
light of that noble revolt against convention, that brave
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CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
return to nature and the springs of poetry in the heart
and the speech of the common people. Literature was
Boyesen's religion more than the Swedenborgian phi
losophy in which we had both been spiritually nur
tured, and at every step of our mounting friendship we
found ourselves on common ground in our worship of
it. I was a decade his senior, but at thirty-five I was
not yet so stricken in years as not to be able fully to re
joice in the ardor which fused his whole being in an in
candescent poetic mass. I have known no man who
loved poetry more generously and passionately; and I
think he was above all things a poet. His work took the
shape of scholarship, fiction, criticism, but poetry gave
it all a touch of grace and beauty. Some years after
this first meeting of ours I remember a pathetic moment
with him, when I asked him why he had not written
any verse of late, and he answered, as if still in sad
astonishment at the fact, that he had found life was not
all poetry. In those earlier days I believe he really
thought it was !
Perhaps it really is, and certainly in the course of a
life that stretched almost to half a century Boyesen
learned more and more to see the poetry of the every
day world at least as the material of art. He did bat
tle valiantly for that belief in many polemics, which I
suppose gave people a sufficiently false notion of him;
and he showed his faith by works in fiction which better
illustrated his motive. Gunnar stands at the beginning
of these works, and at the farthest remove from it in
matter and method stands The Mammon of Unright
eousness. The lovely idyl won him fame and friend
ship, and the great novel added neither to him, though
he had put the experience and the observation of his
ripened life into it. Whether it is too late or too early
for it to win the place in literature which it merits I
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
do not know ; but it always seemed to me the very spite
of fate that it should have failed of popular effect.
Yet I must own that it has so failed, and I own this
without bitterness towards Gunnar, which embalmed
the spirit of his youth as The Mammon of Unright
eousness embodied the thought of his manhood.
Ill
Tt was my pleasure, my privilege, to bring Gunnar
before the public as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and
to second the author in many a struggle with the strange
idiom he had cast the story in. The proofs went back
and forth between us till the author had profited by ev
ery hint and suggestion of the editor. He was quick
to profit by any hint, and he never made the same mis
take twice, lie lived his English as fast as he learned
it; the right word became part of him; and he put
away the wrong word with instant and final rejection.
He had not learned American English without learning
newspaper English, but if one touched a phrase of it
in his work, he felt in his nerves, which are the ulti
mate arbiters in such matters, its difference from true
American and true English. It was wonderful how
apt and how elect his diction was in those days; it
seemed as if his thought clothed itself in the fittest
phrase without his choosing. In his poetry he had ex
traordinary good fortune from the first ; his mind had
an apparent affinity with what was most native, most
racy in our speech; and I have just been looking over
Gunnar and marvelling anew at the felicity and the
beauty of his phrasing.
I do not know whether those who read his books stop
much to consider how rare his achievement was in the
mere means of expression. Our speech is rather more
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CAMBKIDGE NEIGHBOES
hospitable than most, and yet I can remember but five
other writers born to different languages who have
handled English with anything like his mastery. Two
Italians, Kuffini, the novelist, and Gallenga, the jour
nalist ; two Germans, Carl Schurz and Carl Hillebrand,
and the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens, have some of
'them equalled but none of them surpassed him. Yet
he was a man grown when he began to speak and to
write English, though I believe he studied it some
what in Norway before he came to America. What
English he knew he learned the use of here, and in the
measure of its idiomatic vigor we may be proud of it
as Americans.
He had- least of his native grace, I think, in his crit
icism; and yet as a critic he had qualities of rare tem
perance, acuteness, and knowledge. He had very de
cided convictions in literary art; one kind of thing he
believed was good and all other kinds less good down
to what was bad ; but he was not a bigot, and he made
allowances for art-in-error. His hand fell heavy only
upon those heretics who not merely denied the faith
but pretended that artifice was better than nature, that
decoration was more than structure, that make-believe
was something you could live by as you live by truth.
He was not strongest, however, in damnatory criticism.
His spirit was too large, too generous to dwell in that,
and it rose rather to its full height in his appreciations
of the great authors whom he loved, and whom he com
mented from the plenitude of his scholarship as well
as from his delighted sense of their grandeur. Here
he was almost as fine as in his poetry, and only less fine
than in his more fortunate essays in fiction.
After Gunnar he was a long while in striking another
note so true. He did not strike it again till he wrote
The Mammon of Unrighteousness, and after that he
is 259
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
was sometimes of a wandering and uncertain touch.
There are certain stories of his which I cannot read
without a painful sense of their inequality not only
to his talent, but to his knowledge of human nature, and
of American character. He understood our character
quite as well as he understood our language, but at times
he seemed not to do so. I think these were the times
when he was overworked, and ought to have been resting
instead of writing. In such fatigue one loses command
of alien words, alien situations ; and in estimating Boy-
esen's achievements we must never forget that he was
born strange to our language and to our life. In Gun-
nar he handled the one with grace and charm; in his
great novel he handled both with masterly strength. I
call The Mammon of Unrighteousness a great novel,
and I am quite willing to say that I know few novels
by born Americans that surpass it in dealing with
[American types and conditions. It has the vast
horizon of the masterpieces of fictions; its mean
ings are not for its characters alone, but for every read
er of it ; when you close the book the story is not at an
end.
I have a pang in praising it, for I remember that
my praise cannot please him any more. But it was a
book worthy the powrers which could have given us yet
greater tilings if they had not been spent on lesser
tilings. Boyesen could " toil terribly," but for his fame
he did not always toil wisely, though he gave himself as
utterly in his unwise work as in his best ; it was always
the best he could do. Several years after our first meet
ing in Cambridge, he went to live in ISTew York, a city
where money counts for more and goes for less than in
any other city of the world, and he could not resist the
temptation to write more and more when he should
have written less and less. He never wrote anything
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CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
that was not worth reading, but he wrote too mucE for
one who was giving himself with all his conscience to his
academic work in the university honored by his gifts
and his attainments, and was lecturing far and near in
the vacations which should have been days and weeks
and months of leisure. The wonder is that even such
a stock of health as his could stand the strain so long,
but he had no vices, and his only excesses were in the
direction of the work which he loved so well. When a
man adds to his achievements every year, we are apt
to forget the things he has already done; and I think
it well to remind the reader that Boyesen, who died at
forty-eight, had written, besides articles, reviews, and
lectures unnumbered, four volumes of scholarly criti
cism on German and Scandinavian literature, a volume
of literary and social essays, a popular history of Nor
way, a volume of poems, twelve volumes of fiction, and
four books for boys.
Boyesen's energies were inexhaustible. He was not
content to be merely a scholar, merely an author; he
wished to be an active citizen, to take his part in honest
politics, and to live for his day in things that most men
of letters shun. His experience in them helped him to
know American life better and to appreciate it more
justly, both in its good and its evil; and as a matter
of fact he knew us very well. His acquaintance with
us had been wide and varied beyond that of most of our
literary men, and touched many aspects of our civiliza
tion which remain unknown to most Americans. When
he died he had been a journalist in Chicago, and a teach
er in Ohio ; he had been a professor in Cornell Univer
sity and a literary free lance in ]STew York ; and every
where his eyes and ears had kept themselves open. As
a teacher he learned to know the more fortunate or the
more ambitious of our youth, and as a lecturer his
2G1
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
knowledge was continually extending itself among all
ages and classes of Americans.
He was through and through a Norseman, but he was
none the less a very American. Between Norsk and
Yankee there is an affinity of spirit more intimate than
the ties of race. Both have the common-sense view of
life; both are unsentimental. When Boyesen told me
that among the Norwegians men never kissed each other,
as the Germans, and the Frenchmen, and the Italians
do, I perceived that we stood upon common ground.
When he explained the democratic character of society
in Norway, I could well understand how he should find
us a little behind his own countrymen in the practice, if
not the theory of equality, though they lived under a
king and we under a president. But he was proud of
his American citizenship ; he knew all that it meant, at
its best, for humanity. He divined that the true ex
pression of America was not civic, not social, but domes
tic almost, and that the people in the simplest homes, or
those who remained in the tradition of a simple home
life, were the true Americans as yet, whatever the fut
ure Americans might be.
When I first knew him he was chafing with the im
patience of youth and ambition at what he thought his
exile in the West. There was, to be sure, a difference
between Urbana, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and he realized the difference in the extreme and per
haps beyond it. I tried to make him believe that if a
man had one or two friends anywhere who loved letters
and sympathized with him in his literary attempts, it
was incentive enough ; but of course he wished to be in
the centres of literature, as we all do ; and he never was
content until he had set his face and his foot Eastward.
It was a great step for him from the Swedenborgian
school at Urbana to the young university at Ithaca ; and
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CAMBEIDQE NEIGHBORS
I remember his exultation in making it. But he could
not rest there, and in a few years he resigned his profes
sorship, and came to New York, where he entered high-
heartedly upon the struggle with fortune which ended
in his appointment in Columbia.
New York is a mart and not a capital, in literature
as well as in other things, and doubtless he increasingly
felt this. I know that there came a time when he no
longer thought the West must be exile for a literary
man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a
lecturer impressed him with the genuineness of the in
terest felt there in culture of all kinds. He spoke of
this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well as
what was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and
I think that in reconciling himself to our popular crude-
ness for the sake of our popular earnestness, he com
pleted his naturalization, in the only sense in which
our citizenship is worth having.
I do not wish to imply that he forgot his native land,
or ceased to love it proudly and tenderly. He kept for
Norway the fondness which the man sitting at his own
hearth feels for the home of his boyhood. He was of
good family; his people were people of substance and
condition, and he could have had an easier life there
than here. He could have won even wider fame, and
doubtless if he had remained in Norway, he would have
been one of that group of great Norwegians who have
given their little land renown surpassed by that of no
other in the modern republic of letters. The name of
Boyesen would have been set with the names of Bjorn-
son, of Ibsen, of Kielland, and of Lie. But when once
he had seen America (at the wish of his father, who had
visited the United States before him), he thought only
of becoming an American. When I first knew him he
was full of the poetry of his mother-land ; his talk was
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
of fjords and glaciers, of firs and birches, of hulders and
nixies, of housemen and gaardsmen ; but he was glad
to be here, and I think he never regretted that he had
cast his lot with us. Always, of course, he had the deep
est interest in his country and countrymen. He stood
the friend of every Norwegian who came to him in want
or trouble, and they came to him freely and frequently.
He sympathized strongly with Norway in her quarrel
with Sweden, arid her wish for equality as well as au
tonomy; and though he did not go all lengths with the
national party, he was decided in his feeling that Swe
den was unjust to her sister kingdom, and strenuous
for the principles of the Norwegian leaders.
But, as I have said, poetry was what his ardent spirit
mainly meditated in that hour when I first knew him
in Cambridge, before we had either of us grown old
and sad, if not wise. He overflowed with it, and he
talked as little as he dreamed of anything else in the
vast half-summer we spent together. He was constant
ly at my house, where in an absence of my family I was
living bachelor, and where we sat indoors and talked,
or sauntered outdoors and talked, with our heads in a
cloud of fancies, not unmixed with the mosquitoes of
Cambridge : if I could have back the fancies, I would be
willing to have the mosquitoes with them. He looked
the poetry he lived : his eyes were the blue of sunlit
fjords; his brown silken hair was thick on the crown
which it later abandoned to a scholarly baldness; his
soft, red lips half hid a boyish pout in the youthful
beard and mustache. He was short of stature, but of a
stalwart breadth of frame, and his voice was of a pe
culiar and endearing quality, indescribably mellow and
tender when he read his verse.
I have hardly the right to dwell so long upon him
here, for he was only a sojourner in Cambridge, but
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CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
the memory of that early intimacy is too much for my
sense of proportion. As I have hinted, our in
timacy was renewed afterwards, when I too came to
live in ~Ne\v York, where as long as he was in this doles
lome, he hardly let a week go by without passing a long
evening with me. Our talk was still of literature and
life, but more of life than of literature, and we seldom
spoke of those old times. I still found him true to the
ideals which had clarified themselves to both of us as
the duty of unswerving fealty to the real thing in what
ever we did. This we felt, as we had felt it long before,
to be the sole source of beauty and of art, and we warm
ed ourselves at each other's hearts in our devotion to it,
amidst a misunderstanding environment which we did
not characterize by so mild an epithet. Boyesen, in
deed, out-realisted me, in the polemics of our aesthetics,
and sometimes when an unbeliever was by, I willingly
left to my friend the affirmation of our faith, not with
out some quaking at his unsparing strenuousness in dis
ciplining the heretic. But now that ardent and active
soul is Elsewhere, and I have ceased even to expect the
ring, which, making itself heard at the late hour of his
coming, I knew always to be his and not another's. That
mechanical expectation of those who will come no more
is something terrible, but when even that ceases, we
know the irreparability of our loss, and begin to realize
how much of ourselves they have taken with them.
IV
It was some years before the Boyesen summer, which'
was the fourth or fifth of our life in Cambridge, that I
made the acquaintance of a man, very much my senior,
who remains one of the vividest personalities in my
recollection. I speak of him in this order perhaps be-
265
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
cause of an obscure association with Boyesen through
their religious faith, which was also mine. But Henry
James was incommensurably more Swedenborgian than
either of us : he lived and thought and felt Swedenborg
with an entirety and intensity far beyond the mere as
sent of other men. He did not do this in any stupidly
exclusive way, but in the most luminously inclusive
way, with a constant reference of these vain mundane
shadows to the spiritual realities from which they pro
ject. His piety, which sometimes expressed itself in
terms of alarming originality and freedom, was too
large for any ecclesiastical limits, and one may learn
from the books which record it, how absolutely indi
vidual his interpretations of Swedenborg were. Clari
fications they cannot be called, and in that other world
whose substantial verity was the inspiration of his life
here, the two sages may by this time have met and
agreed to differ as to some points in the doctrine of the
Seer. In such a case, I cannot imagine the apostle
giving way ; and I do not say he would be wrong to in
sist, but I think he might now be willing to allow that
the exegetic pages which sentence by sentence were so
brilliantly suggestive, had sometimes a collective opaci
ty which the most resolute vision could not penetrate.
He put into this dark wisdom the most brilliant in
telligence ever brought to the service of his mystical
faith ; he lighted it up with flashes of the keenest wit
and bathed it in the glow of a lambent humor, so that
it is truly wonderful to me how it should remain so
unintelligible. But I have only tried to read certain
of his books, and perhaps if I had persisted in the
effort I might have found them all as clear at last as
the one which seems to me the clearest, and is certainly
most encouragingly suggestive: I mean the one called
Society the Redeemed Form of Man.
266
CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
He had his whole being in his belief ; it had not only
liberated him from the bonds of the Calvinistic theology
in which his youth was trammelled, but it had secured
him against the conscious ethicism of the prevailing
Unitarian doctrine which supremely worshipped Con
duct ; and it had colored his vocabulary to such strange
effects that he spoke of moral men with abhorrence, as
more hopelessly lost than sinners. Any one whose
sphere tempted him to recognition of the foibles of
others, he called the Devil ; but iii spite of his perception
of such diabolism, he was rather fond of yielding to it,
for he had a most trenchant tongue. I myself once fell
under his condemnation as the Devil, by having too
plainly shared his joy in his characterization of certain
f ellow-meii ; perhaps a group of Bostonians from whom
he had just parted and whose reciprocal pleasure of
themselves he presented in the image of " simmering in
their own fat and putting a nice brown on each other."
Swedenborg himself he did not spare as a man. He
thought that very likely his life had those lapses in it
which some of his followers deny ; and he regarded him
on the a.'sthetical side as essentially commonplace, and
as probably chosen for his prophetic function just be
cause of his imaginative nullity : his tremendous revela
tions could be the more distinctly and unmistakably in
scribed upon an intelligence of that sort, which alone
could render again a strictly literal report of them.
As to some other sorts of believers who thought they
had a special apprehension of the truth, he had no
mercy upon them if they betrayed, however innocently,
any self-complacency in their possession. I went one
evening to call upon him with a dear old Shaker elder,
who had the misfortune to say that his people believed
themselves to be living the angelic life. James fast
ened upon him with the suggestion that according to
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Swedenborg the most celestial angels were unconscious
of their own perfection, and that if the Shakers felt
they were of angelic condition they were probably the
sport of the hells. I was very glad to get my poor old
friend off alive, and to find that he was not even aware
of being cut asunder: I did not invite him to shake
himself.
With, spiritualists James had little or no sympathy;
he was not so impatient of them as the Swedenborgians
commonly are, and he probably acknowledged a measure
of verity in the spiritistic phenomena ; but he seemed
rather incurious concerning them, and he must have re
garded them as superfluities of naughtiness, mostly;
as emanations from the hells. His powerful and pene
trating intellect interested itself with all social and civil
facts through his religion. He was essentially religious,
but he was very consciously a citizen, with most decided
opinions upon political questions. My own darkness
as to anything like social reform was then so dense that
I cannot now be clear as to his feeling in such matters,
but I have the impression that it was far more radical
than I could understand. He was of a very merciful
mind regarding things often held in pitiless condemna
tion, but of charity, as it is commonly understood, he
had misgivings. He would never have turned away
from him that asketh; but he spoke with regret of some
of his benefactions in the past, large gifts of money to
individuals, which he now thought had done more harm
than good.
I never knew him to judge men by the society scale.
He was most human in his relations with others, and
was in correspondence with all sorts of people seeking
light and help; he answered their letters and tried to
instruct them, and no one was so low or weak but he or
she could reach him on his or her own level, though he
268
CAMBEIDGE NEIGHBOES
had his humorous perception of their foibles and disa
bilities; and he had that keen sense of the grotesque
which often goes with the kindliest nature. He told of
his dining, early in life, next a fellow-man from Cape
Cod at the Astor House, where such a man could seldom
have found himself. When they were served with meat
this neighbor asked if he would mind his putting his
fat on James's plate : he disliked fat. James said that
he considered the request, and seeing no good reason
against it, consented.
He could be cruel with his tongue when he fancied
insincerity or pretence, and then cruelly sorry for the
hurt he gave. He was indeed tremulously sensitive,
not only for himself but for others, and would offer
atonement far beyond the measure of the offence he
supposed himself to have given.
At all times he thought originally in words of delight
ful originality, which painted a fact with the greatest
vividness. Of a person who had a nervous twitching
of the face, and who wished to call up a friend to them,
he said, " He spasmed to the fellow across the room,
and introduced him." His written style had traits of
the same bold adventurousness, but it was his speech
which was most captivating. As I write of him I see
him before me : his white bearded face, with a kindly in
tensity which at first glance seemed fierce, the mouth
humorously shaping the mustache, the eyes vague be
hind the glasses; his sensitive hand gripping the stick
on which he rested his weight to ease it from the arti
ficial limb he wore.
The Goethean face and figure of Louis Agassiz were
in those days to be seen in the shady walks of Cambridge
to which for me they lent a Weimarish quality, in the
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
degree that in Weimar itself a few years ago, I felt a
quality of Cambridge. Agassiz, of course, was Swiss
and Latin, and not Teutonic, but he was of the Conti
nental European civilization, and was widely different
from the other Cambridge men in everything but love
of the place. " He is always an Europaer" said Low
ell one day, in distinguishing concerning him ; and for
any one who had tasted the flavor of the life beyond the
ocean and the channel, this had its charm. Yet he was
extremely fond of his adoptive compatriots, and no alien
born had a truer or tenderer sense of New England
character. I have an idea that no one else of his day
could have got so much money for science out of the
General Court of Massachusetts ; and I have heard him
speak with the wisest and warmest appreciation of the
hard material from which he was able to extract this
treasure. The legislators who voted appropriations
for his Museum and his other scientific objects were not
usually lawyers or professional men, with the perspec
tives of a liberal education, but were hard-fisted farm
ers, who had a grip of the State's money as if it were
their own, and yet gave it with intelligent munificence.
They understood that he did not want it for himself, and
had no interested aim in getting it ; they knew that, as
he once said, he had no time to make money, and wished
to use it solely for the advancement of learning; and
with this understanding they were ready to help 'him
generously. He compared their liberality with that of
kings and princes, when these patronized science, with
a recognition of the superior plebeian generosity. It
was on the veranda of his summer house at Nahant,
while he lay in the hammock, talking of this, that I
heard him refer also to the offer which Napoleon III.
had made him, inviting him upon certain splendid con
ditions to come to Paris after he had established himself
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CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
in Cambridge. He said that he had not come to Amer
ica without going over every such possibility in his own
mind, and deciding beforehand against it. He was a
republican, by nationality and by preference, and was
entirely satisfied with his position and environment in
New England.
Outside of his scientific circle in Cambridge he was
more friends with Longfellow than with any one else,
I believe, and Longfellow told me how, after the doctors
had condemned Agassiz to inaction, on account of his
failing health he had broken down in his friend's study,
and wept like an Europaer, and lamented, " I shall
never finish my work!" Some papers which he had
begun to write for the Magazine, in contravention of the
Darwinian theory, or part of it, which it is known
Agassiz did not accept, remained part of the work which
he never finished. After his death, I wished Professor
Jeffries Wyman to write of him in the Atlantic, but he
excused himself on account of his many labors, and then
he voluntarily spoke of Agassiz's methods, which he
agreed with rather than his theories, being himself thor
oughly Darwinian. I think he said Agassiz was the first
to imagine establishing a fact not from a single example,
but from examples indefinitely repeated. If it was a
question of something about robins for instance, he
would have a hundred robins examined before he would
receive an appearance as a fact.
Of course no preconception or prepossession of his
own was suffered to bar his way to the final truth he
was seeking, and he joyously renounced even a con
clusion if he found it mistaken. I do not know whether
Mrs. Agassiz has put into her interesting life of him, a
delightful story which she told me about him. He came
to her beaming one day, and demanded, " You know
I have always held such and such an opinion about a
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LITEKAEY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
certain group of fossil fishes ?" " Yes, yes !" " Well,
I have just been reading - — 's new book, and he has
shown me that there isn't the least truth in my theory" ;
and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed pleasure in re
linquishing his error.
I could touch science at Cambridge only on its liter
ary and social side, of course, and my meetings with
lAgassiz were not many. I recall a dinner at his house
to Mr. Bret Harte, when the poet came on from Cali
fornia, and Agassiz approached him over the coffee
through their mutual scientific interest in the last
meeting of the geological " Society upon the Stanislow."
He quoted to the author some passages from the poem
recording the final proceedings of this body, which had
particularly pleased him, and I think Mr. Harte was as
much amused at finding himself thus in touch with the
savant, as Agassiz could ever have been with that de
licious poem.
Agassiz lived at one end of Quincy Street, and James
almost at the other end, with an interval between them
which but poorly typified their difference of tempera
ment. The one was all philosophical and the other all
scientific, and yet towards the close of his life, Agassiz
may be said to have led that movement towards the new
position of science in matters of mystery which is now
characteristic of it. He was ancestrally of the Swiss
" Brahminical caste," as so many of his friends in Cam
bridge were of the Brahminical caste of New England ;
and perhaps it was the line of ancestral pasteurs which'
at last drew him back, or on, to the affirmation of an un-
foi-mulated faith of his own. At any rate, before most
other savants would say that they had souls of their own
he became, by opening a summer school of science with
prayer, nearly as consolatory to the unscientific who
wished to believe they had souls, as Mr. John Fiske him-
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CAMBEIDGE NEIGHBORS
self, tKoughi Mr. Fiske, as tlie arch-apostle of Darwin
ism, had arrived at nearly the same point by such a very
different road.
VI
Mr. Fiske had been our neighbor in our first Cam
bridge home, and when we went to live in Berkeley
Street, he followed with his family and placed himself
across the way in a house which I already knew as the
home of Eichard Henry Dana, the author of Two Years
Before the Mast. Like nearly all the other Cambridge
men of my acquaintance Dana was very much my senior,
and like the rest he welcomed my literary promise as
cordially as if it were performance, with no suggestion
of the condescension which was said to be his attitude
towards many of his fellow-men. I never saw anything
of this, in fact, and I suppose he may have been a blend
of those patrician qualities and democratic principles
which made Lowell anomalous even to himself. He is
part of the antislavery history of his time, and he gave
to the oppressed his strenuous help both as a man and a
politician ; his gifts and learning in the law were freely
at their service. He never lost his interest in those
white slaves, whose brutal bondage he remembered as
bound with them in his Two Years Before the Mast,
and any luckless seaman with a case or cause might
count upon his friendship as surely as the black slaves
of the South. He was able to temper his indignation
for their oppression with a humorous perception of what
was droll in its agents and circumstances; and I wish
I could recall all that he said once about sea-etiquette on
merchant vessels, where the chief mate might no more
speak to the captain at table without being addressed
by him than a subject might put a question to his sover
eign. He was amusing in his stories of the Pacific
273
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
trade in which he said it was very noble to deal in furs
from the Northwest, and very ignoble to deal in hides
along the Mexican and South American coasts. Every
ship's master wished naturally to be in the fur-carrying
trade, and in one of Dana's instances, two vessels en
counter in mid-ocean, and exchange the usual parley
as to their respective ports of departure and destination.
The final demand comes through the trumpet, " What
cargo?" and the captain so challenged yields to
temptation and roars back " Furs !" A moment of
hesitation elapses, and then the questioner pursues,
" Here and there a horn?"
There were other distinctions, of which seafaring
men of other days were keenly sensible, and Dana dram
atized the meeting of a great, swelling East Indiarnan,
with a little Atlantic trader, which has hailed her. She
shouts back through her captain's trumpet that she is
from Calcutta, and laden with silks, spices, and other1
orient treasures, and in her turn she requires like an
swer from the sail which has presumed to enter into par
ley with her. " What cargo ?" The trader confesses
to a mixed cargo for Boston, and to the final question,
her master replies in meek apology, " Only from Liver
pool, sir!" and scuttles down the horizon as swiftly as
possible.
1 Dana was not of the Cambridge men whose calling
iwas in Cambridge. He was a lawyer in active practice,
and he went every day to Boston. One was apt to meet
him. in those horse-cars which formerly tinkled back and
forth between the two cities, and which were often so
full of one's acquaintance that they had all the social
elements of an afternoon tea. They were abusively
overcrowded at times, of course, and one might easily
see a prime literary celebrity swaying from a strap, or
hanging uneasily by the hand-rail to the lower steps of
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CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
the back platform. I do not mean that I ever happened
to see the author of Two Years Before the Mast in either
fact, but in his celebrity he had every qualification for
the illustration of my point. His book probably car
ried the American name farther and wider than any
American books except those of Irving and Cooper at a
day when our writers were very little known, and
our literature was the only infant industry not fos
tered against foreign ravage, but expressly left to
harden and strengthen itself as it best might in a
heartless neglect even at home. The book was delight
ful, and I remember it from a reading of thirty years
ago, as of the stuff that classics are made of. I venture
no conjecture as to its present popularity, but of all
books relating to the sea I think it is the best. The
author when I knew him was still Richard Henry Dana,
Jr., his father, the aged poet, who first established the
name in the public recognition, being alive, though past
literary activity. It was distinctively a literary race.,
and in the actual generation it has given proofs of its;
continued literary vitality in the romance of Espiritw
Santo by the youngest daughter of the Dana I knew.
VII
There could be no stronger contrast to him in origin,
education, and character than a man who lived
at the same time in Cambridge, and who produced
a book which in its final fidelity to life is not unworthy
to be named with Two Years Before the Mast. Ralph
Keeler wrote the Vagabond Adventures which he had
lived. I have it on my heart to name him in the pres
ence of our great literary men not only because I had an
affection for him, tenderer than I then knew, but be
cause I believe his book is worthier of more remem-
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
brance than it seems to enjoy. I was reading it only
the other day, and I found it delightful, and much bet
ter than I imagined when I accepted for the Atlantic the
several papers which it is made up of. I am not sure
hut it belongs to the great literature in that fidelity to
life which I have spoken of, and which the author
brought himself to practise with such difficulty, and
under so much stress from his editor. He really want
ed to fake it at times, but he was docile at last and did it
so honestly that it tells the history of his strange career
in much better terms than it can be given again. He
had been, as he claimed, " a cruel uncle's ward " in
his early orphanhood, and while yet almost a child he
had run away from home, to fulfil his heart's desire
of becoming a clog-dancer in a troupe of negro minstrels.
But it was first his fate to be cabin-boy and bootblack
on a lake steamboat, and meet with many squalid ad
ventures, scarcely to be matched outside of a Spanish
picaresque novel. When he did become a dancer (and
even a danseuse) of the sort he aspired to be, the fru
ition of his hopes was so little what he imagined that
he was very willing to leave the Floating Palace on the
Mississippi in which his troupe voyaged and exhibited,
and enter the college of the Jesuit Fathers at Cape Gir-
ardeau in Missouri. They were very good to him, and in
their charge he picked up a good deal more Latin, if not
less Greek than another strolling player who also took
to literature. From college Keeler wrent to Europe, and
then to California, whence he wrrote me that he was com
ing on to Boston with the manuscript of a novel which
he wished me to read for the magazine. I reported
against it to my chief, but nothing could shake Keeler's
faith in it, until he had printed it at his own cost, and
known it fail instantly and decisively. He had come to
Cambridge to see it through the press, and he remained
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CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
there four or five years, with certain brief absences.
Then, during the Cuban insurrection of the early seven
ties, he accepted the invitation of a Xew York paper to
go to Cuba as its correspondent.
" Don't go, Keeler," I entreated him, when he came
to tell me of his intention. " They'll garrote you down
there."
" Well," he said, with the air of being pleasantly in
terested by the coincidence, as he stood on my study
hearth with his feet wide apart in a fashion he had,
and gayly flirted his hand in the air, " that's what Al-
drich says, and he's agreed to write my biography, 011
condition that I make a last dying speech when they
bring me out on the plaza to do it, ' If I had taken the
advice of my friend T. B. Aldrich, author of Marjorie
Daw and Other People, I should not now be in this
place.' "
He went, and he did not come back. He was not in
deed garroted as his friends had promised, but he was
probably assassinated on the steamer by which he sailed
from Santiago, for he never arrived in Havana, and was
never heard of again.
I now realize that I loved him, though I did as little
to show it as men commonly do. If I am to meet some
where else the friends who are no longer here, I should
like to meet Ralph Keeler, and I would take some
chances of meeting in a happy place a soul which had by
no means kept itself unspotted, but which in all its con
sciousness of error, cheerfully trusted that " the Al
mighty was not going to scoop any of us." The faith
worded so grotesquely could not have been more simply
or humbly affirmed, and no man I think could have been
more helplessly sincere. He had nothing of that false
self-respect which forbids a man to own himself wrong
promptly and utterly when need is ; and in fact he own-
LITERAKY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
ed to some things in his checkered past which would
hardly allow him any sort of self-respect. He had
always an essential gayety not to be damped by any dis
cipline, and a docility which expressed itself in cheer
ful compliance. " Why do you use bias for opinion ?"
I demanded, in going over a .proof with him. " Oh, be
cause I'm such an ass — such a bi-ass."
He had a philosophy which he liked to impress with a
vivid touch on his listener's shoulder: "Put your finger
on the present moment and enjoy it. It's the only one
you've got, or ever will have." This light and joyous
creature could not but be a Pariah among our Brahmins,
and I need not say that I never met him in any of the
great Cambridge houses. I am not sure that he was
a persona grata to every one in my own, for Keeler was
framed rather for men's liking, and Mr. Aldrich and I
had our subtleties as to whether his mind about women
was not so Chinese as somewhat to infect his manner.
Keeler was too really modest to be of any rebellious
mind towards the society which ignored him, and of too
sweet a cheerfulness to be greatly vexed by it. He
lived on in the house of a suave old actor, who oddly
made his home in Cambridge, and he continued of a
harmless Bohemianism in his daily walk, which included
lunches at Boston restaurants as often as he could get
you to let him give them you, if you were of his ac
quaintance. On a Sunday he would appear coming out
of the post-office usually at the hour when all cultivated
Cambridge was coming for its letters, and wave a glad
hand in air, and shout a blithe salutation to the friend
he had marked for his companion in a morning stroll.
The stroll was commonly over the flats towards Brighton
(I do not know why, except perhaps that it was out of
the beat of the better element) and the talk was mainly
of literature, in which he was doing less than he meant
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CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
to do, and which he seemed never able quite to feel was
not a branch of the Show Business, and might not be le
gitimately worked by like advertising, though he truly
loved and honored it.
I suppose it was not altogether a happy life, and
Keeler had his moments of amusing depression, which
showed their shadows in his smiling face. He was of
a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of
almost womanish littleness. He was very blonde, and
his restless eyes were blue ; he wore his yellow beard in
whiskers only, which he pulled nervously but perhaps
did not get to droop so much as he wished.
VIII
Keeler was a native of Ohio, and there lived at Cam
bridge when I first came there an Indianian, more ac
cepted by literary society, who was of real quality as a
poet. Forceythe Willson, whose poem of " The Old
Sergeant " Doctor Holmes used to read publicly in the
closing year of the civil war, was of a Western altitude
of figure, and of an extraordinary beauty of face in an
oriental sort. He had large, dark eyes with clouded
whites ; his full, silken beard was of a flashing Persian
blackness. He was excessively nervous, to such an ex
treme that when I first met him at Longfellow's, he
could not hold himself still in his chair. I think this
was an effect of shyness in him, as well as physical, for
afterwards when I went to find him in his own house
he was much more at ease.
He preferred to receive me in the dim, large hall
after opening his door to me himself, and we sat down
there and talked, I remember, of supernatural things.
He was much interested in spiritualism, and he had
several stories to tell of his own experience in such mat-
279
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
ters. But none was so good as one which I had at sec
ond hand from Lowell, who thought it almost the best
ghost story he had ever heard. The spirit of Willson's
father appeared to him, and stood before him. Will-
son was accustomed to apparitions, and so he said sim
ply, " Won't you sit down, father ?" The phantom put
out his hand to lay hold of a chair-back as some people
do in taking a seat, and his shadowy arm passed through
the frame-work. " Ah!" he said, " I forgot that I was
not substance."
I do not know whether " The Old Sergeant " is ever
read now ; it has probably passed with other great mem
ories of the great war; and I am afraid none of Will-
son's other verse is remembered. But he was then a dis
tinct literary figure, and not to be left out of the count
of our poets. I did not see him again. Shortly after
wards I heard that he had left Cambridge with signs of
'consumption, which must have run a rapid course, for
a very little later came the news of his death.
IX
The most devoted Cantabrigian, after Lowell, whom I
knew, would perhaps have contended that if he had stay
ed with us Willson might have lived ; for John Holmes
affirmed a faith in the virtues of the place which as
cribed almost an aseptic character to its air, and when
he once listened to my own complaints of an obstinate
cold, he cheered himself, if not me, with the declaration,
" Well, one thing, Mr. Howells, Cambridge never let a
man keep a cold yet !"
If he had said it was better to live in Cambridge with
a cold than elsewhere without one I should have believed
him ; as it was, Cambridge bore him out in his assertion,
though she took her own time to do it.
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CAMBKIDGE NEIGHBORS
Lowell had talked to me of him before I met
him, celebrating his peculiar humor with that affec
tion which was not always so discriminating, and
Holmes was one of 'the first Cambridge men I
knew. I knew him first in the charming old
Colonial house in which his famous brother and he
were born. It was demolished long before I left Cam
bridge, but in memory it still stands on the ground since
occupied by the Hemenway Gymnasium, and shows
for me through that bulk a phantom frame of Continen
tal buff in the shadow of elms that are shadows them
selves. The genius loci was limping about the pleasant
mansion with tlie rheumatism which then expressed
itself to his friends in a resolute smile, but which now
insists upon being an essential trait of the full-length
presence to my mind: a short stout figure, helped out
with a cane, and a grizzled head with features formed
to win the heart rather than the eye of the beholder.
In one of his own eyes there was a cast of such win
ning humor and geniality that it took the liking more
than any beauty could have done, and the sweetest,
shy laugh in the world went with this cast.
I long wished to get him to write something for the
Magazine, and at last I prevailed with him to review a
history of Cambridge which had come out. He did it
charmingly of course, for he loved more to speak of
Cambridge than anything else. He held his native town
in an idolatry which was not blind, but which was none
the less devoted because he was aware of her droll points
and her weak points. He always celebrated these as so
many virtues, and I think it was my own passion for her
that first commended me to him. I was not her son, but
he felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault,
and he seemed more and more to forgive it. After we
had got upon the terms of editor and contributor, we met
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LITEKAKY FK1ENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
oftener than before, though I do not now remember
that I ever persuaded him to write again for me. Once
he gave me something, and then took it back, with a
self-distrust of it which I could not overcome.
When the Holmes house was taken down, he went to
live with an old domestic in a small house on the street
amusingly called Appian Way. Pie had certain rooms
of her, and his own table, but he would not allow that
he was ever anything but a lodger in the place, where he
continued till he died. In the process of time he came
so far to trust his experience of me, that he formed the
habit of giving me an annual supper. Some days before
this event, he would appear in my study, and with divers
delicate and tentative approaches, nearly always of the
same tenor, he would say that he should like to ask my
family to an oyster supper with him. " But you know,"
he would explain, " I haven't a house of my own to ask
you to, and I should like to give you the supper here."
When I had agreed to this suggestion with due gravity,
he would inquire our engagements, and then say, as if
a great load were off his mind, " Well, then, I will send
up a few oysters to-morrow," or whatever day we had
fixed on ; and after a little more talk to take the strange
ness out of the affair, would go his way. On the day
appointed the fish-man would come with several gallons
of oysters, which he reported Mr. Holmes had asked
him to bring, and in the evening the giver of the feast
would reappear, with a lank oil-cloth bag, sagged by
some bottles of wine. There was always a bottle of red
wine, and sometimes a bottle of champagne, and he had
taken the precaution to send some crackers beforehand,
so that the supper should be as entirely of his own giving
as possible. He was forced to let us do the cooking and
to supply the cold-slaw, and perhaps he indemnified him
self for putting us to these charges and for the use of
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CAMBEIDGE NEIGHBORS
our linen and silver, by the vast superfluity of his oys
ters, with which we remained inundated for days. He
did not care to eat many himself, but seemed content to
fancy doing us a pleasure ; and I have known few great
er ones in life, than in the hospitality that so oddly play
ed the host to us at our own table.
It must have seemed incomprehensible to such a Can
tabrigian that we should ever have been willing to leave
Cambridge, and in fact I do not well understand it my
self. But if he resented it, he never showed his resent
ment. As often as I happened to meet him after our
defection he used me with unabated kindness, and spar
kled into some gayety too ethereal for remembrance.
The last time I met him was at Lowell's funeral, when I
drove home with him and Curtis and Child, and in the
revulsion from the stress of that saddest event, had our
laugh, as people do in the presence of death, at some
thing droll we remembered of the friend we mourned.
My nearest literary neighbor, when we lived in Sac
ramento Street, was the Eev. Dr. John G. Palfrey, the
historian of New England, whose chimney-tops amid
the pine-tops I could see from my study window when
the leaves were off the little grove of oaks between us,
He was one of the first of my acquaintances, not suffer
ing the great disparity of our ages to count against me,
but tactfully and sweetly adjusting himself to my youth
in the friendly intercourse which he invited. He was a
most gentle and kindly old man, with still an interest
in liberal things which lasted till the infirmities of age
secluded him from the world and all its interests. As
is known, he had been in his prime one of the foremost
of the New England antisla.yery men, and he had
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
fought the good fight with a heavy heart for a brother
long settled in Louisiana who sided with the South, and
who after the civil war found himself disfranchised. In
this temporary disability he came North to visit Doctor
Palfrey upon the doctor's insistence, though at first he
would have nothing to do with him, and refused even
to answer his letters. " Of course," the doctor said,
" I was not going to stand that from my mother's son,
and I simply kept on writing." So he prevailed, but
the fiery old gentleman from Louisiana was reconciled
to nothing in the North but his brother, and when ho
came to return my visit, he quickly touched upon his
cause of quarrel with us. " I can't vote," he declared,
" but my coachman can, and I don't know how I'm to
get the suffrage, unless my physician paints me all
over with the iodine he's using for my rheumatic
side."
Doctor Palfrey was most distinctly of the Brahmini-
cal caste and was long an eminent Unitarian minister,
but at the time I began to know him he had long quitted
the pulpit. He was so far of civic or public character
as to be postmaster at Boston, when we were first neigh
bors, but this officiality was probably so little in keeping
with his nature that it was like a return to his truer self
when he ceased to hold the place, and gave his time alto
gether to his history. It is a work which will hardly
be superseded in the interest of those who value
thorough research and temperate expression. It is very
just, and without endeavor for picture or drama it is to
me very attractive. Much that has to be recorded of
New England lacks charm, but he gave form and dig
nity and presence to the memories of the past, and the
finer moments of that great story, he gave with the sim
plicity that was their best setting. It seems to me such
an apology (in the old sense) as New England might
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CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
have written for herself, and in fact Doctor Palfrey
was a personification of New England in one of the best
and truest kinds. He was refined in the essential gen
tleness of his heart without being refined away ; he kept
the faith of her Puritan tradition though he no longer
kept the Puritan faith, and his defence of the Puritan
severity with the witches and Quakers was as impartial
as it was efficient in positing the Puritans as of their
time, and rather better and not worse than other people
of the same time. He was himself a most tolerant man,
and his tolerance was never weak or fond; it stopped
well short of condoning error, which he condemned when
he preferred to leave it to its own punishment. Person
ally he was without any flavor of harshness; his mind
was as gentle as his manner, which was one of the gen
tlest I have ever known.
Of as gentle make but of more pensive temper, with
unexpected bursts of lyrical gayety, was Christopher
Pearse Cranch, the poet, whom I had known in New
York long before he came to live in Cambridge. He
could not only play and sing most amusing songs, but he
wrote very good poems and painted pictures perhaps not
so good. I always liked his Venetian pictures, for
their poetic, unsentimentalized veracity, and I printed
as well as liked many of his poems. During the time
that I knew him more than his due share of troubles
and sorrows accumulated themselves on his fine head,
which the years had whitened, and gave a droop to the
beautiful, white-bearded face. But he had the artist
soul and the poet heart, and no doubt he could take
refuge in these from the cares that shadowed his visage.
My acquaintance with him in Cambridge renewed
itself upon the very terms of its beginning in New
York. We met at Longfellow's table, where he lifted
up his voice in the Yankee folk-song, " On Springfield
285
LITERAKY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Mountain there did dwell," which he gave with a per
fectly killing mock-gravity.
XI
At Cambridge the best society was better, it seems
to me, than even that of the neighboring capital. It
would be rather hard to prove this, and I must ask the
reader to take my word for it, if he wishes to believe it.
The great interests in that pleasant world, which I
think does not present itself to my memory in a false
iridiscence, were the intellectual interests, and all other
interests were lost in these to such as did not seek them
too insistently.
People held themselves high; they held themselves
personally aloof from people not duly assayed; their
civilization was still Puritan though their belief had
long ceased to be so. They had weights and measures
stamped in an earlier time, a time surer of itself than
ours, by which they rated the merit of all corners, and
rejected such as did not bear the test. These standards
were their own, and they were satisfied with them ; most
Americans have no standards of their own, but these
are not satisfied even with other people's, and so our
society is in a state of tolerant and tremulous misgiving.
Family counted in Cambridge, without doubt, as it
counts in ISTew England everywhere, but family alone
did not mean position, and the want of family did not
mean the want of it. Money still less than family com
manded ; one could be openly poor in Cambridge with
out open shame, or shame at all, for no one was very rich
there, and no one was proud of his riches.
I do not wonder that Turgueuieff thought the condi
tions ideal, as Boyesen portrayed them to him; and I
look back at my own life there with wonder at my good
. 286
CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS
fortune. I was sensible, and I still am sensible -this
had its alloys. I was young and unknown and was mak
ing my way, and I had to suffer some of the penalties
of these disadvantages; but I do not believe that any
where else in this ill-contrived economy, where it is vain
ly imagined that the material struggle forms a high in
centive and inspiration, would my penalties have been
so light. On the other hand, the good that was done me
I could never repay if I lived all over again for others
the life that I have so long lived for myself. At times,
when I had experienced from those elect spirits with
whom I was associated, some act of friendship, as signal
as it was delicate, I used to ask myself, how I could ever
do anything unhandsome or ungenerous towards any one
again ; and I had a bad conscience the next time I did it.
The air of the Cambridge that I knew was sufficient
ly cool to be bracing, but what was of good import in me
flourished in it. The life of the place had its lateral
limitations; sometimes its lights failed to detect ex
cellent things that lay beyond it ; but upward it opened
illimitably. I speak of it frankly because that life
as I witnessed it is now almost wholly of the past. Cam
bridge is still the home of much that is good and fine in
our literature: one realizes this if one names Colonel
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Mr. John Fiske, Mr.
William James, Mr. Horace E. Scudder, not to name
any others, but the first had not yet come back to live in
his birthplace at the time I have been writing of, and
the rest had not yet their actual prominence. One, in
deed among so many absent, is still present there, whom
from time to time I have hitherto named without offer
ing him the recognition which I should have known an
infringement of his preferences. But the literary
Cambridge of thirty years ago could not be clearly
imagined or justly estimated without taking into ac-
287
LITEEAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
count the creative sympathy of a man whose contribu
tions to our literature only partially represent what he
has constantly done for the humanities. I am sure
that, after the easy heroes of the day are long forgot,
and the noisy fames of the strenuous life shall dwindle
to their essential insignificance before those of the gen
tle life, we shall all see in Charles Eliot Norton the
eminent scholar who left the quiet of his books to be
come our chief citizen at the moment when he warned
his countrymen of the ignominy and disaster of doing
wrong.
part
A BELATED GUEST
IT is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of
things finds compensation in the privilege, however
undisputed by his contemporaries, of recording his mem
ories of it. This is, in the first two or three instances,
a pleasure. It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by
the fire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the
past ; and if the Absences thus entreated to become
Presences are those of famous people, they lend to the
fond historian a little of their lustre, in which he basks
for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity. But
another time comes, and comes very soon, when the
pensive pleasure changes to the pain of duty, and the
precious privilege converts itself into a grievous obliga
tion. You are unable to choose your company among
those immortal shades ; if one, why not another, where
all seem to have a right to such gleams of this dolce lome
as your reminiscences can shed upon them ? Then they
gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms,
that one, if one continues to survive, is in danger of
wearing out such welcome, great or small, as met one's
recollections in the first two or three instances, if one
does one's duty by each. People begin to say, and not
without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as
this: "Ah, here he is again with his recollections!"
Well, but if the recollections by some magical good-
fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of his
289
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
as, say, Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or
at least excused ?
My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest,
on the Atlantic shore, of that progress of his from the
Pacific Slope, which, in the simple days of 1871, was
like the progress of a prince, in the universal attention
and interest which met and followed it. He was in
deed a prince, a fairy prince in whom every lover of his
novel and enchanting art felt a patriotic property, for
his promise and performance in those earliest tales of
The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Tennessee's Partner,
and Niggles, and The Outcasts of Polcer Flat, were the
earnests of an American literature to come. If it is
still to come, in great measure, that is not Harte's fault,
for he kept on writing those stories, in one form or
another, as long as he lived. He wrote them first and
last in the spirit of Dickens, which no man of his time
could quite help doing, but he wrote them from the
life of Bret Harte, on the soil and in the air of the
newest kind of new world, and their freshness took the
soul of his fellow-countrymen not only with joy, but
with pride such as the Europeans, who adored him
much longer, could never know in him.
When the adventurous young editor who had pro
posed being his host for Cambridge and the Boston
neighborhood, while Harte was still in San Francisco,
and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward,
read of the honors that attended his coming from point
to point, his courage fell, as if he had perhaps com
mitted himself in too great an enterprise. Who was
he, indeed, that he should think of making this
" Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,"
290
his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago
Harte failed of attending a banquet of honor because
the givers of it had not sent a carriage to fetch him to
it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco ? Whether
true or not, and it was probably not true in just that
form, it must have been this rumor which determined
his host to drive into Boston for him with the hand
somest hack which the livery of Cambridge afforded,
and not trust to the horse-car and the local expressman
to get him and his baggage out, as he would have done
with a less portentous guest. However it was, he in
stantly lost all fear when they met at the station, and
Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as
if he were not even a fairy prince, and with that voice
and laugh which were surely the most winning in the
world. He was then, as always, a child of extreme
fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which
he wore in a mustache and the drooping side-whiskers
of the day, and his jovial physiognomy was as winning
as his voice, with its straight nose and fascinating
thrust of the under lip, its fine eyes, and good fore
head, then thickly crowned with the black hair which
grew early white, while his mustache remained dark:
the most enviable and consoling effect possible in the
universal mortal necessity of either aging or dying.
He was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted,
but after the first glance one forgot this, so that a lady
who met him for the first time could say to him, " Mr.
Harte, aren't you afraid to go about in the cars so
recklessly when there is this scare about smallpox?"
" Xo, madam," he could answer in that rich note of
his, with an irony touched by pseudo-pathos, " I bear
a charmed life."
The drive out from Boston was not too long for get
ting on terms of personal friendship with the family
20 291
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
which just filled the hack, the two boys intensely inter
ested in the novelties of a New England city and sub
urb, and the father and mother continually exchanging
admiration of such aspects of nature as presented them
selves in the leafless sidewalk trees, and patches of park
and lawn. They found everything so fine, so refined,
after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the
natural forms were so vast that one could not get on
companionable terms with them. Their host heard
them without misgiving for the world of romance
which Harte had built up among those huge forms,
and with a subtle perception that this was no excursion
of theirs to the East, but a lifelong exodus from the
exile which he presently understood they must always
have felt California to be. It is different now, when
people are every day being born in California, and
must begin to feel it home from the first breath, but
it is notable that none of the Californians of that great
early day have gone back to live amid the scenes which
inspired and prospered them.
Before they came in sight of the editor's humble roof
he had mocked himself to his guest for his trepidations,
and Harte with burlesque magnanimity had consented
to be for that occasion only something less formidable
than he had loomed afar. He accepted with joy the
theory of passing a week in the home of virtuous pov
erty, and the week began as delightfully as it went on.
Erom first to last Cambridge amused him as much as it
charmed him by that air of academic distinction which
was stranger to him even than the refined trees and
grass. It has already been told how, after a list of the
local celebrities had been recited to him, he said, " Why,
you couldn't stand on your front porch and fire off your
revolver without bringing down a two-volumer," and
no doubt the pleasure he had in it was the effect of its
292
A BELATED GUEST
contrast with the wild California he had known, and
perhaps, when he had not altogether known it, had
invented.
ii
Cambridge began very promptly to show him those
hospitalities which he could value, and continued the
fable of his fairy princeliness in the curiosity of those
humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts
or his fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty pres
ences in the tie-backs of the period were seen to flit be
fore the home of virtuous poverty, hungering for any
chance sight of him which his outgoings or incomings
might give. The chances were better with the outgoings
than with the incomings, for these were apt to be so
hurried, in the final result of his constitutional delays,
as to have the rapidity of the homing pigeon's flight,
and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest eye. It
cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte
was nearly always late for those luncheons and dinners
which he was always going out to, and it needed the
anxieties and energies of both families to get him into
his clothes, and then into the carriage where a good deal
of final buttoning must have been done, in order that
he might not arrive so very late. He was the only one
concerned who was quite unconcerned ; his patience
with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived at the
expected houses smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a
bland gayety from his whole person, and ready to ig
nore any discomfort he might have occasioned.
Of course, people were glad to have him on his own
terms, and it may be truly said that it was worth while
to have him on any terms. There never was a more
charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest.
293
L1TEBABY FBIEXDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a
talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller ; but he could
now and then drop the fittest word, and with a glance
or smile of friendly intelligence express the apprecia
tion of another's fit word which goes far to establish for
a man the character of boon humorist. It must be said
of him that if he took the honors easily that were paid
him he took them modestly, and never by word or look
invited them, or implied that he expected them. It
was fine to see him humorously accepting the humor
ous attribution of scientific sympathies from Agassiz,
in compliment of his famous epic describing the in
cidents that " broke up the society upon the Stanis-
low." It was a little fearsome to hear him frankly
owning to Lowell his dislike for something overliterary
in the phrasing of certain verses of The Cathedral.
But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man
who could say the sort of things that Ilarte said to
him of that delicious line picturing the bobolink
as he —
"Runs dovm a brook of laughter in the air."
This, Ilarte told him, was the line he liked best of all
his lines, and Lowell smoked well content with the
praise. Yet they were not men to get on easily to
gether, Lowell having limitations in directions where
Harte had none. Afterward in London they did not
meet often or willingly. Lowell owned the brilliancy
and uncominonness of Ilarte's gift, while he sumptu
ously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more
or less a Jew by finding that Ilarte was at least half a
Jew on his father's side ; he had long contended for the
Hebraicism of his name.
With all his appreciation of the literary eminences
whom Fields used to class together as " the old saints,"
294
A BELATED GUEST
Harte had a spice of irreverence that enabled him to
take them more ironically than they might have liked,
and to see the fun of a minor literary man's relation to
them. Emerson's smoking amused him, as a Jovian
self - indulgence divinely out of character with so su
preme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling
how Emerson at Concord had proposed having a " wet
night " with him over a glass of sherry, and had urged
the scant wine upon his young friend with a hospitable
gesture of his cigar. But this was long after the Cam
bridge episode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the
corrosive touch of his subtle irreverence, or, more strict
ly speaking, had only the effect of his reverence. That
gentle and exquisitely modest dignity of Longfellow's
he honored with as much veneration as it was in him
to bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow's beauti
ful and perfected art which is almost a test of a critic's
own fineness.
in
As for Harte's talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the
extreme of satire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness
even for the things he admired. He did not apparently
care to hear himself praised, but he could very ac
curately and perfectly mark his discernment of excel
lence in others. He was at times a keen observer of
nature and again not, apparently. Something was said
before him and Lowell of the beauty of his description
of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and
lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened
heart visibly shaking it ; then the talk turned on the
graphic homeliness of Dante's noticing how the dog's
skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the exquisite
shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.
295
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as
the sort of bush that Sandy drunkenly slept under in
The Idyl of Red Gulch, lie asked, " Why, is that an
azalea?" To be sure, this might have been less from
his ignorance or indifference concerning the quality
of the bush he had sent Sandy to sleep under than from
his willingness to make a mock of an azalea in a very
small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azalea
of Californian size could easily lend itself to.
You never could be sure of Harte ; he could only by
chance be caught in earnest about anything or anybody.
Except for those slight recognitions of literary traits in
his talk with Lowell, nothing remained from his con
versation but the general criticism he passed upon his
brilliant fellowr-Hebrew Heine, as " rather scorbutic."
He preferred to talk about the little matters of common
incident and experience. He amused himself with such
things as the mystification of the postman of whom he
asked his way to Phillips Avenue, where he adventur
ously supposed his host to be living. " Why," the post
man said, " there is no Phillips Avenue in Cambridge.
There's Phillips Place." "Well," Harte assented,
" Phillips Place will do; but there is a Phillips Ave
nue." He entered eagerly into the canvass of the
distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him, at the
reception made for him, but he had even a greater pleas
ure in compassionating his host for the vast disparity
between the caterer's china and plated ware and the
simplicities and humilities of the home of virtuous pov
erty; and he spluttered with delight at the sight of the
lofty epergnes set up and down the supper-table when
he was brought in to note the preparations made in his
honor. Those monumental structures were an inex
haustible joy to him; he walked round and round the
room, and viewed them in different perspectives, so as
296
A BELATED GUEST
to get the full effect of the towering forms that dwarfed
it so.
He was a tease, as many a sweet and fine wit is apt
to be, but his teasing was of the quality of a caress, so
much kindness went with it. lie lamented as an ir
reparable loss his having missed seeing that night an
absent-minded brother in literature, who came in rub
ber shoes, and forgetfully wore them throughout the
evening. That hospitable soul of Ralph Keeler, who
had known him in California, but had trembled for
their acquaintance when he read of all the honors that
might well have spoiled Harte for the friends of his
simpler days, rejoiced in the unchanged cordiality of
his nature when they met, and presently gave him one
of those restaurant lunches in Boston, which he was
always sumptuously providing out of his destitution.
Harte was the life of a time which was perhaps less
a feast of reason than a flow of soul. The truth is,
there was nothing but careless stories carelessly told,
and jokes and laughing, and a great deal of mere laugh
ing without the jokes, the whole as unlike the ideal of
a literary symposium as well might be; but there was
present one who met with that pleasant Boston com
pany for the first time, and to whom Harte attributed
a superstition of Boston seriousness not realized then
and there. u Look at him," he said, from time to time.
" This is the dream of his life," arid then shouted and
choked with fun at the difference between the occasion
and the expectation he would have imagined in his
commensal's mind. At a dinner long after in London,
where several of the commensals of that time met again,
with other literary friends of a like age and stature,
Harte laid his arms well along their shoulders as they
formed in a half-circle before him, and screamed out
in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the
297
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
slim shapes of the earlier date had come. The sight
was not less a rapture to him that he was himself the
prey of the same practical joke from the passing years.
The hair which the years had wholly swept from some
of those thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal
spears, " or few or none," to " shake against the cold,"
had whitened to a wintry snow on his, while his mus
tache had kept its youthful black. " He looks," one of
his friends said to another as they walked home to
gether, " like a French marquis of the ancien regime."
"Yes," the other assented, thoughtfully, "or like an
American actor made up for the part."
The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was
of a subtle injustice in its implication of anything his
trionic in Harte's nature. ISTever was any man less a
poseur ; he made simply and helplessly known what he
was at any and every moment, and he would join the
witness very cheerfully in enjoying whatever was amus
ing in the disadvantage to himself. In the course of
events, which were in his case so very human, it came
about on a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an
impatient creditor decided to right himself out of the
proceeds of the lecture which was to be given, and had
the law corporeally present at the house of the friend
where Harte dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-
hall, and on the platform, where the lecture was de
livered with beautiful aplomb and untroubled charm.
He was indeed the only one privy to the law's pres
ence who was not the least affected by it, so that when
his host of an earlier time ventured to suggest, " Well,
Harte, this is the old literary tradition; this is the
Fleet business over again," he joyously smote his thigh
and crowed out, " Yes, the Fleet !" No doubt he tasted
all the delicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure
in it was quite unaffected.
298
A BELATED GUEST
If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh con
ditions of the elder American world, it might very well
be that his temperament was not altogether in the
wrong. If it disabled him for certain experiences of
life, it was the source of what was most delightful in
his personality, and perhaps most beautiful in his tal
ent. It enabled him to do such things as he did without
being at all anguished for the things he did not do,
and indeed could not. His talent was not a facile
gift ; he owned that he often went day after day to his
desk, and sat down before that yellow post-office paper
on which he liked to write his literature, in that ex
quisitely refined script of his, without being able to
inscribe a line. It may be owned for him that though
he came to the East at thirty-four, which ought to have
been the very prime of his powers, he seemed to have
arrived after the age of observation was past for him.
He saw nothing aright, either in Newport, where he
went to live, or in Xew York, where he sojourned, or
on those lecturing tours which took him about the
whole country; or if he saw it aright, he could not
report it aright, or would not. After repeated and
almost invariable failures to deal with the novel char
acters and circumstances which he encountered he left
off trying, and frankly went back to the semi-mythical
California he had half discovered, half created, and
wrote Bret Harte over and over as long as he lived.
This, whether he did it from instinct or from reason,
was the best thing he could do, and it went as nearly
as might be to satisfy the insatiable English fancy
for the wild America no longer to be found on our
map.
It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament de
fended him from any bitterness in the disappointment
he may have shared with that simple American public
299
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and
everything of him in fiction and drama. The long
breath was not his ; he could not write a novel, though
he produced the like of one or two, and his plays were
too bad for the stage, or else too good for it. At any
rate, they could not keep it, even when they got it, and
they denoted the fatigue or the indifference of their
author in being dramatizations of his longer or shorter
fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts. The di
rection in which his originality lasted longest, and most
strikingly affirmed his power, was in the direction of
his verse.
Whatever minds there may be about Harte's fiction
finally, there can hardly be more than one mind about
his poetry. He was indeed a poet; whether he wrote
what drolly called itself " dialect," or wrote language,
he was a poet of a fine and fresh touch. It must be
allowed him that in prose as Avell he had the inventive
gift, but he had it in verse far more importantly. There
are lines, phrases, turns in his poems, characterizations,
and pictures which will remain as enduririgly as any
thing American, if that is not saying altogether too
little for them. In poetry he rose to all the occasions
he made for himself, though he could not rise to the
occasions made for him, and so far failed in the de
mands he acceded to for a Phi Beta Kappa poem, as
to come to that august Harvard occasion with a jingle
so trivial, so out of keeping, so inadequate that his
enemies, if he ever truly had any, must have suffered
from it almost as much as his friends. He himself
did not suffer from his failure, from having read before
the most elect assembly of the country a poem which
would hardly have served the careless needs of an in
formal dinner after the speaking had begun; he took
the whole disastrous business lightly, gayly, leniently,
300
A BELATED GUEST
kindly, as that golden temperament of his enabled him
to take all the good or bad of life.
The first year of his Eastern sojourn was salaried in
a sum which took the souls of all his young contempo
raries with wonder, if no baser passion, in the days
when dollars were of so much farther flight than now,
but its net result in a literary return to his publishers
was one story and two or three poems. They had not
profited much by his book, which, it will doubtless
amaze a time of fifty thousand editions selling before
their publication, to learn had sold only thirty-five hun
dred in the sixth month of its career, as Harte himself,
" With sick and scornful looks averse,"
confided to his Cambridge host after his first interview
with the Boston counting-room. It was the volume
which contained " The Luck of Roaring Camp," and
the other early tales which made him a continental, and
then an all but a world-wide fame. Stories that had
been talked over, and laughed over, and cried over all
up and down, the land, that had been received with
acclaim by criticism almost as boisterous as their popu
larity, and recognized as the promise of greater things
than any done before in their kind, came to no more
than this pitiful figure over the booksellers' counters.
It argued much for the publishers that in spite of this
stupefying result they were willing, they were eager,
to pay him ten thousand dollars for whatever, however
much or little, he chose to write in a year. Their offer
was made in Boston, after some offers mortifyingly
mean, and others insultingly vague, had been made in
Xew York.
It was not his fault that their venture proved of such
slight return in literary material. Harte was in the
301
LITEEAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
midst of new and alien conditions, and he had always
his temperament against him, as well as the reluctant
if not the niggard nature of his muse. He would no
doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did
for the money, but actually if not literally he could not
do more. When it came to literature, all the gay im
providence of life forsook him, and he became a stern,
rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself noth
ing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He
was of the order of literary men like Goldsmith and Do
Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, in his relations with
the outer world, but in his relations with the inner
world he was one of the most duteous and exemplary
citizens. There was nothing of his easy-going hilarity
in that world ; there he was of a Puritanic severity, and
of a conscience that forgave him 110 pang. Other Cali
fornia writers have testified to the fidelity with which
he did his work as editor. He made himself not mere
ly the arbiter but the inspiration of his contributors,
and in a region where literature had hardly yet replaced
the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made the
sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and
created a literary periodical of the first class on the
borders of civilization.
It is useless to wonder now what would have been his
future if the publisher of the Overland Monthly had
been of imagination or capital enough to meet the de
mand which Harte dimly intimated to his Cambridge
host as the condition of his remaining in California.
Publishers, men with sufficient capital, are of a greatly
varying gift in the regions of prophecy, and he of the
Overland 'Montlihj was not to be blamed if he could
not foresee his account in paying Harte ten thousand
a year to continue editing the magazine. He did ac
cording to his lights, and Harte came to the East, and
302
A BELATED GUEST
then went to England, where his last twenty-five years
were passed in cultivating the wild plant of his Pacific
Slope discovery. It was always the same plant, leaf
and flower and fruit, but it perennially pleased the
constant English world, and thence the European world,
though it presently failed of much delighting these fas
tidious States. Probably he would have done some
thing else if he could; he did not keep on doing the
wild mining-camp thing because it was the easiest, but
because it was for him the only possible thing. Very
likely he might have preferred not doing anything.
IV
The joyous visit of a week, which has been here so
poorly recovered from the past, came to an end, and the
host went with his guest to the station in as much
vehicular magnificence as had marked his going to meet
him there. Harte was no longer the alarming portent
of the earlier time, but an experience of unalloyed de
light. You must love a person whose worst trouble-
giving was made somehow a favor by his own uncon
sciousness of the trouble, and it was a most flattering
triumph to have got him in time, or only a little late,
to so many luncheons and dinners. If only now he
could be got to the train in time the victory would be
complete, the happiness of the visit without a flaw.
Success seemed to crown the fondest hope in this re
spect. The train had not yet left the station; there
stood the parlor-car which Harte had seats in; and he
was followed aboard for those last words in which peo
ple try to linger out pleasures they have known together.
In this case the sweetest of the pleasures had been sit
ting up late after those dinners, and talking them over,
303
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
and then degenerating from that talk into the mere
giggle and making giggle which Charles Lamb found
the best thing in life. It had come to this as the host
and guest sat together for those parting moments, when
Ilarte suddenly started up in the discovery of having
forgotten to get some cigars. They rushed out of the
train together, and after a wild descent upon the cigar-
counter of the restaurant, Harte rushed back to his car.
But by this time the train was already moving with
that deceitful slowness of the departing train, and
Ilarte had to clamber up the steps of the rearmost
platform. His host clambered after, to make sure that
he was aboard, which done, he dropped to the ground,
while Ilarte drew out of the station, blandly smiling,
and waving his hand with a cigar in it, in picturesque
farewell from the platform.
Then his host realized that he had dropped to the
ground barely in time to escape being crushed against
the side of the archway that sharply descended beside
the steps of the train, and lie went and sat down in that
handsomest hack, and was for a moment deathly sick
at the danger that had not realized itself to him in
season. To be sure, he was able, long after, to adapt
the incident to the exigencies of fiction, and to have a
character, not otherwise to be conveniently disposed of,
actually crushed to death between a moving train and
such an archway.
Besides, he had then, and always afterward, the im
mense supercompensation of the memories of that visit
from one of the most charming personalities in the
world,
"In life's morning march when his bosom was young,"
and when infinitely less would have sated him. Now
death has come to join its vague conjectures to the
304
A BELATED GUEST
broken expectations of life, and that blithe spirit is
elsewhere. But nothing can take from him who re
mains the witchery of that most winning presence.
Still it looks smiling from the platform of the car,
and casts a farewell of mock heartbreak from it. Still
a gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years that
are now numbered, and out of somewhere the hearer's
sense is rapt with the mellow cordial of a voice that
was like no other.
pajt (Ten
MY MARK TWAIN
I
IT was in the little office of James T. Fields, over
the book-store of Ticknor & Fields, at 124 Tremont
Street, Boston, that I first met my friend of now forty-
four years, Samuel L. Clemens. Mr. Fields was then
the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his
proud and glad assistant, with a pretty free hand as
to manuscripts, and an unmanacled command of the
book - notices at the end of the magazine. I wrote
nearly all of them myself, and in 1869 I had written
rather a long notice of a book just winning its way to
universal favor. In this review I had intimated my
reservations concerning the Innocents Abroad, but I
had the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was
such fun as we had not had before. I forget just
what I said in praise of it, and it does not matter;
it is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the
author. He now signified as much, and he stamped
his gratitude into my memory with a story wonder
fully allegorizing the situation, which the mock mod
esty of print forbids my repeating here. Through
out my long acquaintance with him his graphic touch
was always allowing itself a freedom which I cannot
bring my fainter pencil to illustrate. He had the
21 307
LITEEARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth
of parlance, which I suppose one ought not to call
coarse without calling one's self prudish; and I was
often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the
letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop
on rank suggestion; I could not bear to burn them,
and I could not, after the first reading, quite bear to
look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this point
by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his
ghost will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian.
At the time of our first meeting, which must have
been well toward the winter, Clemens (as I must call
him instead of Mark Twain, which seemed always
somehow to mask him from my personal sense) was
wearing a sealskin coat, with the fur out, in the satis
faction of a caprice, or the love of strong effect which
he was apt to indulge through life. I do not know
what droll comment was in Fields's mind with respect
to this garment, but probably he felt that here was
an original who was not to be brought to any Bostonian
book in the judgment of his vivid qualities. With his
crest of dense red hair, and the wide sweep of his
flaming mustache, Clemens was not discordantly clothed
in that sealskin coat, which afterward, in spite of his
own warmth in it, sent the cold chills through me when
I once accompanied it down Broadway, and shared the
immense publicity it won him. He had always a relish
for personal effect, which expressed itself in the white
suit of complete serge which he wore in his last years,
and in the Oxford gown which he put on for every
possible occasion, and said he would like to wear all the
time. That was not vanity in him, but a keen feeling
for costume which the severity of our modern tailor
ing forbids men, though it flatters women to every ex
cess in it; yet he also enjoyed the shock, the offence,
308
MY MARK TWAIN
the pang which it gave the sensibilities of others. Then
there were times he played these pranks for pure fun,
and for the pleasure of the witness. Once I remember
seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in
a pair of white cowskin slippers, with the hair out, and
do a crippled colored uncle to the joy of all beholders.
Or, I must not say all, for I remember also the dismay
of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of, " Oh,
Youth!" That was her name for him among their
friends, and it fitted him as no other would, though
I fancied with her it was a shrinking from his bap
tismal Samuel, or the vernacular Sam of his earlier
companionships. He was a youth to the end of his
days, the heart of a boy with the head of a sage; the
heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but always a wilful
boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every time
for just the boy he was.
MY MARK TWAIN
the pang which it gave the sensibilities of others. Then
there were times he played these pranks for pure fun,
and for the pleasure of the witness. Once I remember
seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in
a pair of white cowskin slippers, with the hair out, and
do a crippled colored uncle to the joy of all beholders.
Or, I must not say all, for I remember also the dismay
of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of, " Oh,
Youth!" That was her name for him among their
friends, and it fitted him as no other would, though
I fancied with her it was a shrinking from his bap
tismal Samuel, or the vernacular Sam of his earlier
companionships. He was a youth to the end of his
days, the heart of a boy with the head of a sage; the
heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but always a wilful
boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every time
for just the boy he was.
II
THERE is a gap in my recollections of Clemens, which
I think is of a year or two, for the next tiling I remem
ber of him is meeting him at a lunch in Boston given
us by that genius of hospitality, the tragically destined
Kalph Keeler, author of one of the most unjustly for
gotten books, Vagabond Adventures, a true bit of pica
resque autobiography. Keeler never had any money, to
the general knowledge, and he never borrowed, and he
could not have had credit at the restaurant where he
invited us to feast at his expense. There was T. B.
Aldrich, there was J. T. Fields, much the oldest of
our company, who had just freed himself from the
trammels of the publishing business, and was feeling
his freedom in every word ; there was Bret Harte, who
had lately come East in his princely progress from
California; and there was Clemens. Nothing remains
to me of the happy time but a sense of idle and aim
less and joyful talk-play, beginning and ending no
where, of eager laughter, of countless good stories from
Fields, of a heat - lightning shimmer of wit from Al
drich, of an occasional concentration of our joint mock
eries upon our host, who took it gladly; and amid the
discourse, so little improving, but so full of good fel
lowship, Bret Harte's fleering dramatization of Clem-
ens's mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston
illuminates. " Why, fellows," he spluttered, " this is
the dream of Mark's life," and I remember the glance
310
MY MARK TWAIN
from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which be
trayed his enjoyment of the fun. We had beefsteak
with mushrooms, which in recognition of their shape
Aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and to crown the feast we
had an omelette souffle, which the waiter brought in
as flat as a pancake, amid our shouts of congratula
tions to poor Keeler, who took them with appreciative
submission. It was in every way what a Boston lit
erary lunch ought not to have been in the popular ideal
which Harte attributed to Clemens.
Our next meeting was at Hartford, or, rather, at
Springfield, where Clemens greeted us on the way to
Hartford. Aldrich was going on to be his guest, and
I was going to be Charles Dudley Warner's, but Clem
ens had come part way to welcome us both. In the
good fellowship of that cordial neighborhood we had
two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in
his round. There was constant running in and out of
friendly houses where the lively hosts and guests called
one another by their Christian names or nicknamee,
and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion
in which he satisfied his love of magnificence as if it
had been another sealskin coat, and he was at the crest
of the prosperity which enabled him to humor every
whim or extravagance. The house was the design of
that most original artist, Edward Potter, who once,
when hard pressed by incompetent curiosity for the
name of his style in a certain church, proposed that it
should be called the English violet order of archi
tecture; and this house was so absolutely suited to
the owner's humor that I suppose there never was an
other house like it ; but its character must be for recog
nition farther along in these reminiscences. The vivid-
est impression which Clemens gave us two ravenous
311
LITEEARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
young Boston authors was of the satisfying, the sur
feiting nature of subscription publication. An army
of agents was overrunning the country with, the pros
pectuses of his books, and delivering them by the scores
of thousands in completed sale. Of the Innocents
1 Abroad he said, " It sells right along just like the
Bible," and Roughing It was swiftly following, with
out perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity. But
he lectured Aldrich and me on the folly of that mode
of publication in the trade which we had thought it
the highest success to achieve a chance in. " Anything
but subscription publication is printing for private cir
culation," he maintained, and he so won upon our greed
and hope that on the way back to Boston we planned
the joint authorship of a volume adapted to subscrip
tion publication. We got a very good name for it, as
we believed, in Memorable Murders, and we never got
farther with it, but by the time we reached Boston we
were rolling in wealth so deep that we could hardly
walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still
thought it best to spare car fare ; carriage fare we did
not dream of even in that opulence.
Ill
THE visits to Hartford which had begun with this
affluence continued without actual increase of riches
for me, but now I went alone, and in Warner's Euro
pean and Egyptian absences I formed the habit of
going to Clemens. By this time he was in his new
house, where he used to give me a royal chamber on
the ground floor, and come in at night after I had gone
to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family
should not be roused if anybody tried to get in at my
window. This would be after we had sat up late, he
smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and sooth
ing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we
both talked and talked and talked, of everything in the
heavens and on the earth, and the waters under the
earth. After two days of this talk I would come away
hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of
those locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark
of trees at the end of summer. Once, after some such
bout of brains, we went down to New York together,
and sat facing each other in the Pullman smoker with
out passing a syllable till we had occasion to say,
" Well, we're there." Then, with our installation in
a now vanished hotel (the old Brunswick, to be
specific), the talk began again with the inspiration
of the novel environment, and went on and on. We
wished to be asleep, but we could not stop, and he
lounged through the rooms in the long nightgown which
313
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
he always wore in preference to the pajamas which he
despised, and told the story of his life, the inexhaust
ible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights story, which I could
never tire of even when it began to be told over again.
Or at times he would reason high—
" Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,"
walking up and down, and halting now and then, with
a fine toss and slant of his shaggy head, as some bold
thought or splendid joke struck him.
He was in those days a constant attendant at the
church of his great friend, the Rev. Joseph II. Twichell,
and at least tacitly far from the entire negation he
came to at last. I should say he had hardly yet ex
amined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his
wife's belief, for it was hers and not his, and he held it
unscanned in the beautiful and tender loyalty to her
which was the most moving quality of his most faithful
soul. I make bold to speak of the love between them,
becaiise without it I could not make him known to
others as he was known to me. It was a greater part
of him than the love of most men for their wives, and
she merited all the worship he could give her, all the
devotion, all the implicit obedience, by her surpassing-
force and beauty of character. She was in a way the
loveliest person I have ever seen, the gentlest, the kind
est, without a touch of weakness; she united wonder
ful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only
accepted her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried
in it. I am not sure that he noticed all her goodness
in the actions that made it a heavenly vision to others,
he so had the habit of her goodness; but if there was
any forlorn and helpless creature in the room Mrs.
314
MY MARK TWAIN
Clemens was somehow promptly at his side or hers;
she was always seeking occasion of kindness to those
in her household or out of it ; she loved to let her heart
go beyond the reach of her hand, and imagined the
whole hard and suffering world with compassion for its
structural as well as incidental wrongs. I suppose she
had her ladyhood limitations, her female fears of eti
quette and convention, but she did not let them hamper
the wild and splendid generosity with which Clemens
rebelled against the social stupidities and cruelties. She
had been a lifelong invalid when he met her, and he
liked to tell the beautiful story of their courtship to each
new friend whom he found capable of feeling its beauty
or worthy of hearing it. Naturally, her father had hesi
tated to give her into the keeping of the young strange
Westerner, who had risen up out of the unknown with
his giant reputation of burlesque humorist, and de
manded guaranties, demanded proofs. " He asked
me," Clemens would say, " if I couldn't give him the
names of people who knew me in California, and when
it was time to hear from them I heard from him.
' Well, Mr. Clemens,' he said, ' nobody seems to havo
a very good word for you.' I hadn't referred him to
people that I thought were going to whitewash me. I
thought it was all up with me, but I was disappointed.
' So I guess I shall have to back you myself.' '
Whether this made him faithfuler to the trust put
in him I cannot say, but probably not; it was always
in him to be faithful to any trust, and in proportion
as a trust of his own was betrayed he was ruthlessly
and implacably resentful. But I wish now to speak
of the happiness of that household in Hartford which
responded so perfectly to the ideals of the mother when
the three daughters, so lovely and so gifted, were yet
little children. There had been a boy, and " Yes, /
315
LITEKAEY FEIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
killed him," Clemens once said, with the unsparing
self-blame in which he would wreak an unavailing re
gret. He meant that he had taken the child out im-
D
prudently, and the child had taken the cold which he
died of, but it was by no means certain this was through
its father's imprudence. I never heard him speak of
his son except that once, but no doubt in his deep heart
his loss was irreparably present. He was a very tender
father and delighted in the minds of his children, but
he was wise enough to leave their training altogether
to the wisdom of their mother. He left them to that
in everything, keeping for himself the pleasure of
teaching them little scenes of drama, learning lan
guages with them, and leading them in singing. They
came to the table with their parents, and could have
set him an example in behavior when, in moments of
intense excitement, he used to leave his place and walk
up and down the room, flying his napkin and talking
and talking.
It was after his first English sojourn that I used to
visit him, and he was then full of praise of everything
English: the English personal independence and pub
lic spirit, and hospitality, and truth. He liked to tell
stories in proof of their virtues, but he was not blind
to the defects of their virtues : their submissive ac
ceptance of caste, their callousness with strangers, their
bluntness with one another. Mrs. Clemens had been
in a way to suffer socially more than he, and she
praised the English less. She had sat after dinner
with ladies who snubbed and ignored one another, and
left her to find her own amusement in the absence of
the attention with which Americans perhaps cloy their
guests, but which she could not help preferring. In
their successive sojourns among them I believe he came
to like the English less and she more; the fine delight
316
MY MARK TWAIN
of his first acceptance among them did not renew itself
till his Oxford degree was given him ; then it made his
cup run over, and he was glad the whole world should
see it.
His wife would not chill the ardor of his early Anglo
mania, and in this, as in everything, she wished to
humor him to the utmost. iSTo one could have realized
more than she his essential fineness, his innate noble
ness. Marriages are what the parties to them alone
really know them to be, but from the outside I should
say that this marriage was one of the most perfect.
It lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her
death, that delayed long in cruel suffering, and that
left one side of him in lasting night. From Florence
there came to me heartbreaking letters from him about
the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter say
ing she was dead, with the simple-hearted cry, " I wish
I was with Livy." I do not know why I have left
saying till now that she was a very beautiful woman,
classically regular in features, with black hair smooth
over her forehead, and with tenderly peering, myopic
eyes, always behind glasses, and a smile of angelic kind
ness. But this kindness went with a sense of humor
which qualified her to appreciate the self-lawed genius
of a man who will be remembered with the great hu
morists of all time, with Cervantes, with Swift, or with'
any others worthy his company; none of them was his
equal in humanity.
IV
CLEMENS had appointed himself, with the architect's
connivance, a luxurious study over the library in his
new house, but as his children grew older this study,
with its carved and cushioned arm-chairs, was given
over to them for a school-room, and he took the room
above his stable, which had been intended for his coach
man. There we used to talk together, when we were
not walking and talking together, until he discovered
that he could make a more commodious use of the
billiard-room at the top of his house, for the purposes
of literature and friendship. It was pretty cold up
there in the early spring and late fall weather with
which I chiefly associate the place, but by lighting up
all the gas-burners and kindling a reluctant fire on the
hearth we could keep it well above freezing. Clemens
could also push the balls about, and, without rivalry
from me, who could no more play billiards than smoke,
could win endless games of pool, while he carried
points of argument against imaginable differers in
opinion. Here he wrote many of his tales and sketches,
and for anything I know some of his books. I par
ticularly remember his reading me here his first rough
sketch of Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, with
the real name of the captain, whom I knew already
from his many stories about him.
We had a peculiar pleasure in looking off from the
high windows on the pretty Hartford landscape, and
318
down from them into the tops of the trees clothing the
hillside by which his house stood. We agreed that
there was a novel charm in trees seen from such a van
tage, far surpassing that of the farther scenery. lie
had not been a country boy for nothing; rather he had
been, a country boy, or, still better, a village boy, for
everything that Mature can offer the young of our
species, and no aspect of her was lost on him. We were
natives of the same vast Mississippi Valley; and Mis
souri was not so far from Ohio but that we were akin
in our first knowledges of woods and fields as we were
in our early parlance. I had outgrown the use of
mine through my greater bookishness, but I gladly
recognized the phrases which he employed for their
lasting juiciness and the long-remembered savor they
had on his mental palate.
I have elsewhere sufficiently spoken of his unso
phisticated use of words, of the diction which forma
the backbone of his manly style. If I mention my
own greater bookishness, by which I mean his less
quantitative reading, it is to give myself better oc
casion to note that he was always reading some vital
book. It might be some out-of-the-way book, but it had
the root of the human matter in it: a volume of great
trials ; one of the supreme autobiographies ; a signal
passage of history, a narrative of travel, a story of
captivity, which gave him life at first-hand. As I re
member, he did not care much for fiction, and in that
sort he had certain distinct loathings; there were cer
tain authors whose names he seemed not so much to
pronounce as to spew out of his mouth. Goldsmith was
one of these, but his prime abhorrence was my dear
and honored prime favorite, Jane Austen. He once
said to me, I suppose after he had been reading some
of my unsparing praises of her — I am always prais-
319
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
ing her, " You seem to think that woman could write,"
and he forbore withering me with his scorn, apparently
because we had been friends so long, and he more
pitied than hated me for my bad taste. He seemed not
to have any preferences among novelists ; or at least
I never heard him express any. He used to read the
modern novels I praised, in or out of print; but I do
not think he much liked reading fiction. As for plays,
he detested the theatre, and said he would as lief do a
sum as follow a plot on the stage. He could not, or did
not, give any reasons for his literary abhorrences, and
perhaps he really had none. But he could have said
very distinctly, if he had needed, why he liked the
books he did. I was away at the time of his great
Browning passion, and I know of it chiefly from hear
say; but at the time Tolstoy was doing what could be
done to make ine over Clemens wrote, " That man
seems to have been to you what Browning was to me."
I do not know that he had other favorites among the
poets, but he had favorite poems which he liked to read
to you, and he read, of course, splendidly. I have for
gotten what piece of John Hay's it was that he liked
so much, but I remembered how he fiercely revelled
in the vengefulness of William Morris's Sir Guy of the
Dolorous Blast, and how he especially exalted in the
lines which tell of the supposed speaker's joy in slaying
the murderer of his brother :
" I am threescore years and ten,
And my hair is nigh turned gray,
But I am glad to think of the moment when
I took his life away."
Generally, I fancy his pleasure in poetry was not great,
and I do not believe he cared much for the convention
ally accepted masterpieces of literature. He liked to
320
MY MARK TWAIN
find out good things and great things for himself;
sometimes he would discover these in a masterpiece
new to him alone, and then, if you brought his igno
rance home to him, he enjoyed it, and enjoyed it the
more the more you rubbed it in.
Of all the literary men I have known he was the
most unlitcrary in his make and manner. I do not
know whether he had any acquaintance with Latin,
but I believe not the least ; German he knew pretty
well, and Italian enough late in life to have fun with
it; but he used English in all its alien derivations as
if it were native to his own air, as if it had come up
out of American, out of Missourian ground. His style
was what we know, for good and for bad, but his
manner, if I may difference the two, was as entirely
his own as if no one had ever written before. I have
noted before this how he was not enslaved to the con-
secutiveness in writing which the rest of us try to keep
chained to. That is, he wrote as he thought, and as all
men think, without sequence, without an eye to what
went before or should come after. If something be
yond or beside what he was saying occurred to him,
he invited it into his page, and made it as much at
home there as the nature of it would suffer him. Then,
when he Avas through with the welcoming of this casual
and unexpected guest, he would go back to the company
he was entertaining, and keep on with what he had
been talking about. He observed this manner in the
construction of his sentences, and the arrangement of
his chapters, and the ordering or disordering of his
compilations. I helped him with a Library of Hu
mor, which he once edited, and when I had done my
work according to tradition, with authors, times, and
topics carefully studied in due sequence, he tore it all
apart, and " chucked " the pieces in wherever the fancy^
321
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
for them took him at the moment. He was right: wo
were not making a text-book, but a book for the pleas
ure rather than the instruction of the reader, and he
did not see why the principle on which he built his
travels and reminiscences and tales and novels should
not apply to it; and I do not now see, either, though
at the time it confounded me. On minor points he
was, beyond any author I have known, without favorite
phrases or pet words. He utterly despised the avoid
ance of repetitions out of fear of tautology. If a word
served his turn better than a substitute, he would use
it as many times in a page as he chose.
AT that time I had become editor of The Atlantic
Monthly, and I had allegiances belonging to the con
duct of what was and still remains the most scrupu
lously cultivated of our periodicals. When Clemens
began to write for it he carrie willingly under its rules,
for with all his wilfulness there never was a more
biddable man in things you could show him a reason
for. He never made the least of that trouble which
so abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-
minded contributors. If you wanted a thing changed,
very good, he changed it ; if you suggested that a word
or a sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out,
very good, he struck it out. His proof-sheets carne
back each a veritable " mush of concession," as Emer
son says. ISTow and then he would try a little stronger
language than The Atlantic had stomach for, and once
when I sent him a proof I made him observe that I had
left out the profanity. He wrote back : " Mrs. Clemens
opened that proof, and lit into the room with danger in
her eye. What profanity? You see, when I read the
manuscript to her I skipped that," It was part of his
joke to pretend a violence in that gentlest creature
which the more amusingly realized the situation to their
friends.
I was always very glad of him and proud of him
as a contributor, but I must not claim the whole merit,
22 323
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
or the first merit of having him write for us. It was
the publisher, the late II. O. Ho lighten, who felt the
incongruity of his absence from the leading periodical
of the country, and was always urging me to get him
to write. I will take the credit of being eager for
him, but it is to the publisher's credit that he tried, so
far as the modest traditions of The Atlantic would
permit, to meet the expectations in pay which the colos
sal profits of Olemens's books might naturally have
bred in him. Whether he was really able to do this he
never knew from Clemens himself, but probably twenty
dollars a page did not surfeit the author of books that
"sold right along just like the Bible."
We had several short contributions from Clemens
first, all of capital quality, and then we had the series
of papers which went mainly to the making of his great
book, Life on the Mississippi. Upon the whole I have
the notion that Clemens thought this his greatest book,
and he was supported in his opinion by that of the
portier in his hotel at Vienna, arid that of the German
Emperor, who, as he told me with equal respect for the
preference of each, united in thinking it his best; with
such far-sundered social poles approaching in its favor,
he apparently found himself without standing for op
position. At any rate, the papers won instant appre
ciation from his editor and publisher, and from the
readers of their periodical, which they expected to
prosper beyond precedent in its circulation. But those
were days of simpler acceptance of the popular rights
of newspapers than these are, when magazines strictly
guard their vested interests against them. The New
York Times and the St. Louis Democrat profited by
the advance copies of the magazine sent them to re
print the papers month by month. Together they cov
ered nearly the whole reading territory of the Union,
324
MY MARK TWAIN
and the terms of their daily publication enabled them
to anticipate the magazine in its own restricted field.
Its subscription list was not enlarged in the slightest
measure, and The Atlantic Monthly languished on the
news-stands as undesired as ever.
VI
IT was among my later visits to Hartford that we
began to talk up the notion of collaborating a play,
but we did not arrive at any clear intention, and it
was a telegram out of the clear sky that one day sum
moned me from Boston to help with a continuation of
Colonel Setters. I had been a witness of the high joy of
Clemens in the prodigious triumph of the first Colonel
Sellers, which had been dramatized from the novel
of The Gilded Age. This was the joint work of Clem
ens and Charles Dudley Warner, and the story had
been put upon the stage by some one in Utah, whom
Clemens first brought to book in the courts for viola
tion of his copyright, and then indemnified for such
rights as his adaptation of the book had given him.
The structure of the play as John T. Raymond gave it
was substantially the work of this unknown dramatist.
Clemens never pretended, to me at any rate, that he
had the lea,st hand in it; he frankly owned that he
was incapable of dramatization ; yet the vital part was
his, for the characters in the play were his as the book
embodied them, and the success which it won with the
public was justly his. This he shared equally with the
actor, following the company with an agent, who
counted out the author's share of the gate money, and
sent him a note of the amount every day by postal
card. The postals used to come about dinner-time, and
Clemens would read them aloud to us in wild triumph.
326
jMY MAKE TWAIN
One hundred and fifty dollars — two hundred dollars —
three hundred dollars were the gay figures which they
bore, and which he flaunted in the air before lie sat
down at table, or rose from it to brandish, and then,
flinging his napkin into his chair, walked up and down
to exult in.
By-and-by the popularity of the play waned, and the
time came when he sickened of the whole affair, and
withdrew his agent, and took whatever gain from it the
actor apportioned him. He was apt to have these sud
den surceases, following upon the intensities of his
earlier interest; though he seemed always to have the
notion of making something more of Colonel Sellers.
But when I arrived in Hartford in answer to his sum
mons, I found him with no definite idea of what he
wanted to do with him. I represented that we must
have some sort of plan, and he agreed that we should
both jot down a scenario overnight and compare our
respective schemes the next morning. As the author
of a large number of little plays which have been
privately presented throughout the United States and
in parts of the United Kingdom, without ever getting
upon the public stage except for the noble ends of
charity, and then promptly getting off it, I felt au
thorized to make him observe that his scheme was as
nearly nothing as chaos could be. He agreed hilari
ously with me, and was willing to let it stand in proof
of his entire dramatic inability. At the same time he
liked my plot very much, which ultimated Sellers, ac
cording to Clemens's intention, as a man crazed by his
own inventions and by his superstition that he was the
rightful heir to an English earldom. The exuberant
nature of Sellers and the vast range of his imagina
tion served our purpose in other ways. Clemens made
him a spiritualist, whose specialty in the occult was
327
LITEKAEY FKIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
materialization; he became on impulse an ardent
temperance reformer, and he headed a procession of
temperance ladies after disinterestedly testing the del
eterious effects of liquor upon himself until he could
not walk straight; always he wore a marvellous fire-
extinguisher strapped on his back, to give proof in any
emergency of the effectiveness of his invention in that
way.
We had a jubilant fortnight in working the par
ticulars of these things out. It was not possible for
Clemens to write like anybody else, but I could very
easily write like Clemens, and we took the play scene
and scene about, quite secure of coming out in tem
peramental agreement. The characters remained for
the most part his, and I varied them only to make them
more like his than, if possible, he could. Several years
after, when I looked over a copy of the play, I could
not always tell my work from his; I only knew that I
had done certain scenes. We would work all day long
at our several tasks, and then at night, before dinner,
read them over to each other. No dramatists ever got
greater joy out of their creations, and when I reflect
that the public never had the chance of sharing our joy
I pity the public from a full heart. I still believe
that the play was immensely funny ; I still believe that
if it could once have got behind the footlights it would
have continued to pack the house before them for an
indefinite succession of nights. But this may be my
fondness.
At any rate, it was not to be. Raymond had identi
fied himself with Sellers in the play-going imagina
tion, and whether consciously or unconsciously we con
stantly worked with Eaymond in our minds. But be
fore this time bitter displeasures had risen between
Clemens and Raymond, and Clemens was determined
328
MY MARK TWAIN
that Raymond should never have the play. He first
offered it to several other actors, who eagerly caught
at it, only to give it back with the despairing renuncia
tion, " That is a Raymond play." We tried managers
with it, but their only question was whether they could
get Raymond to do it. In the mean time Raymond
had provided himself with a play for the winter — a
very good play, by Demarest Lloyd ; and he was in no
hurry for ours. Perhaps he did not really care for
it; perhaps he knew when he heard of it that it must
come to him in the end. In the end it did, from my
hand, for Clemens would not meet him. I found him in
a mood of sweet reasonableness, perhaps the more soft
ened by one of those lunches which our publisher, the
hospitable James R. Osgood, was always bringing people
together over in Boston. He said that he could not do
the play that winter, but he was sure that he should like
it, and he had no doubt he would do it the next winter.
So I gave him the manuscript, in spite of Clemens's
charges, for his suspicions and rancors were such that he
would not have had me leave it for a moment in the
actor's hands. But it seemed a conclusion that involved
success and fortune for us. In due time, but I do not
remember how long after, Raymond declared himself
delighted with the piece ; he entered into a satisfactory
agreement for it, and at the beginning of the next season
he started with it to Buffalo, where he was to give a
first production. At Rochester he paused long enough
to return it, with the explanation that a friend had noted
to him the fact that Colonel Sellers in the play was a
lunatic, and insanity was so serious a thing that it
could not be represented on the stage without outraging
the sensibilities of the audience ; or words to that ef
fect. We were too far off to allege Hamlet to the
contrary, or King Lear, or to instance the delight which
329
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
generations of readers throughout the world had taken
in the mad freaks of Don Quixote.
Whatever were the real reasons of Raymond for re
jecting the play, we had to be content with those he
gave, and to set ahout getting it into other hands. In
this effort we failed even more signally than before,
if that were possible. At last a clever and charming
elocutionist, who had long wished to get himself on the
stage, heard of it and asked to see it. We would have
shown it to any one by this time, and we very willingly
showed it to him. He came to Hartford and did some
scenes from it for us. I must say he did them very
well, quite as well as Raymond could have done them,
in whose manner he did them. But now, late toward
spring, the question was where he could get an en
gagement with the play, and we ended by hiring a
theatre in !N"ew York for a week of trial perform
ances.
Clemens came on witli me to Boston, where we were
going to make some changes in the piece, and where we
made them to our satisfaction, but not to the effect of
that high rapture which wo had in the first draft. Ho
went back to Hartford, and then the cold fit came upon
me, and " in visions of the night, in slumberings upon
the bed," ghastly forms of failure appalled me, and
when I rose in the morning I wrote him : " Here is a
play which every manager has put out-of-doors and
which every actor known to us has refused, and now
we go and give it to an elocutioner. We are fools."
Whether Clemens agreed with me or not in my con
clusion, he agreed with me in my premises, and we
promptly bought our play off the stage at a cost of
seven hundred dollars, which we shared between us.
But Clemens was never a man to give up. I relin
quished gratis all right and title I had in the play,
330
MY MARK TWAIN
and lie paid its entire expenses for a week of one-night
stands in the country. It never came to New York;
and yet I think now that if it had come, it would have
succeeded. So hard does the faith of the unsuccessful
dramatist in his work die!
VII
THERE is an incident of this time so characteristic
of both men that I will yield to the temptation of giv
ing it here. After I had gone to Hartford in response
to Clemens's telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in Bos
ton, and one of my family called on his, to explain why
I was not at home to receive his introduction: I had
gone to see Mark Twain. " Oh, but he doesn't like
that sort of thing, does he ?" " He likes Mr. Clemens
very much," my representative answered, " and he
thinks him one of the greatest men he ever knew."
I was still Clemens's guest at Hartford when Arnold
came there to lecture, and one night we went to meet
him at a reception. While his hand laxly held mine
in greeting, I saw his eyes fixed intensely on the other
side of the room. " Who — who in the world is that 3"
I looked and said, " Oh, that is Mark Twain." I do
not remember just how their instant encounter was
contrived by Arnold's wish, but I have the impression
that they were not parted for long during the evening,
and the next night Arnold, as if still under the glam
our of that potent presence, was at Clemens's house.
I cannot say how they got on, or what they made of
each other; if Clemens ever spoke of Arnold, I do not
recall what he said, but Arnold had shown a sense of
him from which the incredulous sniff of the polite
world, now so universally exploded, had already per
ished. It might well have done so with his first dra-
332
MY MAKK TWAIN
matic vision of that prodigious head. Clemens was
then hard upon fifty, and he had kept, as he did to
the end, the slender figure of his youth, but the ashes
of the burnt-out years were beginning to gray the fires
of that splendid shock of red hair which he held to the
height of a stature apparently greater than it was,
and tilted from side to side in his undulating walk,
lie glimmered at you from the narrow slits of fine blue-
greenish eyes, under branching brows, which with age
grew more and more like a sort of plumage, and he
was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but ami
able perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence ;
you were all there for him, but he was not all there
for you.
VIII
I SHALL not try to give chronological order to my
recollections of him, but since I am just now with him
in Hartford I will speak of him in association with
the place. Once when I came on from Cambridge he
followed me to my room to see that the water was not
frozen in my bath, or something of the kind, for it was
very cold weather, and then hospitably lingered. Not
to lose time in banalities I began at once from the
thread of thought in my mind. " I wonder why we
hate the past so," and he responded from the depths
of his own consciousness, " It's so damned humiliat
ing," which is what any man would say of his past
if he were honest ; but honest men are few when it
comes to themselves. Clemens was one of the few, and
the first of them among all the people I have known.
I have known, I suppose, men as truthful, but not so
promptly, so absolutely, so positively, so almost ag
gressively truthful. He could lie, of course, and did
to save others from grief or harm ; he was not stupidly
truthful ; but his first impulse was to say out the thing
and everything that was in him. To those who can
understand it will not be contradictory of his sense of
humiliation from the past, that he was not ashamed for
anything he ever did to the point of wishing to hide it.
He could be, and he was, bitterly sorry for his errors,
which he had enough of in his life, but he was not
ashamed in that mean way. What he had done he
334
MY MARK TWAIN
owned to, good, bad, or indifferent, and if it was bad
he was rather amused than troubled as to the effect in
your mind. He would not obtrude the fact upon you,
but if it were in the way of personal history he would
not dream of withholding it, far less of hiding it.
He was the readiest of men to allow an error if he
were found in it. In one of our walks about Hartford,
when he was in the first fine flush of his agnosticism,
he declared that Christianity had done nothing to im
prove morals and conditions, and that the world under
the highest pagan civilization was as well off as it was
under the highest Christian influences. I happened to
be fresh from the reading of Charles Loring Brace's
Gesta Ckristi; or, History of Humane Progress, and I
could offer him abundant proofs that he was wrong.
He did not like that evidently, but he instantly gave
way, saying he had not known those things. Later ho
was more tolerant in his denials of Christianity, but
just then he was feeling his freedom from it, and re
joicing in having broken what he felt to have been the
shackles of belief worn so long. He greatly admired
Robert Ingersoll, whom he called an angelic orator,
and regarded as an evangel of a new gospel — the gospel
of free thought. He took the warmest interest in the
newspaper controversy raging at the time as to the ex
istence of a hell ; when the noes carried the day, I sup
pose that no enemy of perdition was more pleased. He
still loved his old friend and pastor, Mr. Twichell, but
he no longer went to hear him preach his sane and
beautiful sermons, and was, I think, thereby the greater
loser. Long before that I had asked him if he went
regularly to church, and he groaned out : " Oh yes, I
go. It 'most kills me, but I go," and I did not need
his telling me to understand that he went because his
wife wished it. He did tell me, after they both ceased
335
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
to go, that it had finally come to her saying, " Well,
if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you." He
could accept that willingness for supreme sacrifice and
exult in it because of the supreme truth as he saw it.
After they had both ceased to be formal Christians,
she was still grieved by his denial of immortality, so
grieved that he resolved upon one of those heroic lies,
which for love's sake he held above even the truth,
and he went to her, saying that he had been thinking
the whole matter over, and now he was convinced that
the soul did live after death. It was too late. Her
keen vision pierced through his ruse, as it did when he
brought the doctor who had diagnosticated her case as
organic disease of the heart, and, after making him go
over the facts of it again with her, made him declare it
merely functional.
To make an end of these records as to Clemens's be
liefs, so far as I knew them, I should say that he never
went back to anything like faith in the Christian the
ology, or in the notion of life after death, or in a con
scious divinity. It is best to be honest in this matter;
he would have hated anything else, and I do not believe
that the truth in it can hurt any one. At one period
he argued that there must have been a cause, a con
scious source of things; that the universe could not
have come by chance. I have heard also that in his
last hours or moments he said, or his dearest ones hoped
he had said, something about meeting again. But the
expression, of which they could not be certain, was of
the vaguest, and it was perhaps addressed to their
tenderness out of his tenderness. All his expressions
to me were of a courageous renunciation of any hope
of living again, or elsewhere seeing those he had lost.
He suffered terribly in their loss, and he was not fool
enough to try ignoring his grief. He knew that for
336
MY MARK TWAIN"
this there were but two medicines; that it would wear
itself out with the years, and that meanwhile there was
nothing for it but those respites in which the mourner
forgets himself in slumber. I remember that in a black
hour of my own when I was called down to see him,
as he thought from sleep, he said with an infinite, an
exquisite compassion, " Oh, did I wake you, did I wake
you?" Nothing more, but the look, the voice, were
everything ; and while I live they cannot pass from my
sense.
IX
HE was the most caressing of men in his pity, but
he had the fine instinct, which would have pleased
Lowell, of never putting his hands on you — fine, deli
cate hands, with taper fingers, and pink nails, like a
girl's, and sensitively quivering in moments of emo
tion; he did not paw you with them to show his af
fection, as so many of us Americans are apt to do.
Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities
that each of us becomes, I should say that Clernens's
central and final personality was something exquisite.
His casual acquaintance might know him, perhaps,
from his fierce intensity, his wild pleasure in shocking
people with his ribaldries and profanities, or from the
mere need of loosing his rebellious spirit in that way,
as anything but exquisite, and yet that was what in the
last analysis he was. They might come away loathing
or hating him, but one could not know him well with
out realizing him the most serious, the most humane,
the most conscientious of men. He was Southwestern,
and born amid the oppression of a race that had no
rights as against ours, but I never saw a man more
regardful of negroes. He had a yellow butler when I
first began to know him, because he said he could not
bear to order a white man about, but the terms of his
ordering George were those of the softest entreaty which
command ever wore. He loved to rely upon George,
who was such a broken reed in some things, though
338
MY MARK TWAIN
so stanch in others, and the fervent Republican in poli
tics that Clemens then liked him to be. He could in
terpret Clemens's meaning; to the public without convey
ing his mood, and could render his roughest answer
smooth to the person denied his presence. His general
instructions were that this presence was to be denied all
but personal friends, but the soft heart of George was
sometimes touched by importunity, and once he came
up into the billiard-room saying that Mr. Smith wished
to see Clemens. Upon inquiry, Mr. Smith developed
no ties of friendship, and Clemens said, " You go and
tell Mr. Smith that I wouldn't come down to see the
Twelve Apostles." George turned from the threshold
where he had kept himself, and framed a paraphrase
of this message which apparently sent Mr. Smith away
content with himself and all the rest of the world.
The part of him that was Western in his South
western origin Clemens kept to the end, but he was
the most desouthcrnized Southerner I ever knew. Jfo
man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred
slavery, and no one has ever poured such scorn upon
the second-hand, Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of
the Southern ideal. He held himself responsible for
the wrong which the white race had done the black race
in slavery, and he explained, in paying the way of a
negro student through Yale, that he was doing it as his
part of the reparation due from every white to every
black man. He said he had never seen this student,
nor ever wished to see him or know his name; it was
quite enough that he was a negro. About that time a
colored cadet w^as expelled from West Point for some
point of conduct " unbecoming an officer and gentle
man," and there was the usual shabby philosophy in a'
portion of the press to the effect that a negro could
never feel the claim of honor. The man was fifteen'
23 339
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
parts white, but, " Oh yes," Clemens said, with bitter
irony, " it was that one part black that undid him."
It made him a " nigger " and incapable of being a
gentleman. It was to blame for the whole thing. The
fifteen parts white were guiltless.
Clemens was entirely satisfied with the result of the
Civil War, and he was eager to have its facts and mean
ings brought out at once in history. He ridiculed tho
notion, held by many, that " it was not yet time " to phi
losophize the events of the great struggle ; that we must
" wait till its passions had cooled," and " the clouds of
strife had cleared away." He maintained that the time
would never come when we should see its motives and
men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was
the hour to ascertain them in lasting verity. Pictu
resquely and dramatically he portrayed the imbecility
of deferring the inquiry at any point to the distance of
future years when inevitably the facts would begin to
put on fable.
He had powers of sarcasm and a relentless rancor
in his contempt which those who knew him best appre
ciated most. The late Noah Brooks, who had been in
California at the beginning of Clemeus's career, and
'Had witnessed the effect of his ridicule before he had
learned to temper it, once said to me that he would
rather have any one else in the world down on him than
Mark Twain. But as Clemens grew older he grew
more merciful, not to the wrong, but to the men who
were in it. The wrong was often the source of his
wildest drolling. He considered it in such hopeless
ness of ever doing it justice that his despair broke in
laughter.
I GO back to that house in Hartford, where I was so
often a happy guest, with tenderness for each of its
endearing aspects. Over the chimney in the library
which had been cured of smoking by so much art and
science, Clemens had written in perennial brass the
words of Emerson, " The ornament of a house is the
friends who frequent it," and he gave his guests a wel
come of the simplest and sweetest cordiality: but I
must not go aside to them from my recollections of
him, which will be of sufficient garrulity, if I give them
as fully as I wish. The windows of the library looked
northward from the hillside above which the house
stood, and over the little valley with the stream in it,
and they showed the leaves of the trees that almost
brushed them as in a Claude Lorraine glass. To the
eastward the dining-room opened amply, and to the
south there was a wide hall, where the voices of friends
made themselves heard as they entered without cere
mony and answered his joyous hail. At the west was
a little semi-circular conservatory of a pattern invented
by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, and adopted in most of
the houses of her kindly neighborhood. The plants
were set in the ground, and the flowering vines climbed
up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent
spray of a fountain companied by callas and other
water-loving lilies. There, while we breakfasted, Pat
rick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty
341
LITEKARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the
delicate accents of its varied blossoms. Breakfast was
Clernens's best meal, and he sat longer at his steak and
coffee than at the courses of his dinner ; luncheon was
nothing to him, unless, as might happen, he made it
his dinner, and reserved the later repast as the oc
casion of walking up and down the room, and dis
coursing at large on anything that came into his head.
Like most good talkers, he liked other people to have
their say; he did not talk them down; he stopped in
stantly at another's remark and gladly or politely
heard him through; he even made believe to find sug
gestion or inspiration in what was said. His children
came to the table, as I have told, and after dinner he
was apt to join his fine tenor to their trebles in singing.
Fully half our meetings were at my house in Cam
bridge, where lie made himself as much at home as in
Hartford. He would come ostensibly to stay at the
Parker House, in Boston, and take a room, where he
would light the gas and leave it burning, after dress
ing, while he drove out to Cambridge and stayed two
or three days with us. Once, I suppose it was after a
lecture, he came in evening dress and passed twenty-
four hours with us in that guise, wearing an overcoat
to hide it when we went for a walk. Sometimes he
wore the slippers which he preferred to shoes at home,
and if it was muddy, as it was wont to be in Cambridge,
he would put a pair of rubbers over them for our ram
bles. He liked the lawlessness and our delight in al
lowing it, and he rejoiced in the confession of his
hostess, after we had once almost worn ourselves out
in our pleasure with the intense talk, with the stories
and the laughing, that his coming almost killed her,
but it. was worth it.
In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or,
342
MY MAKE TWAIN
rather, with reluctant sleepiness, and he had various
specifics for promoting it. At first it had been cham
pagne just before going to bed, and we provided that,
but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of
lager-beer under his arms ; lager-beer, he said now,
was the only thing to make you go to sleep, and we
provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at
Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only sop
orific worth considering, and Scotch whiskey duly
found its place on our sideboard. One day, very long
afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot
Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking
anything. For a while he had found going to bed on
the bath-room floor a soporific ; then one night he went
to rest in his own bed at tori o'clock, and had gone
promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the
like with the like effect ever since. Of course, it
amused him ; there were few experiences of life, grave
or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they
wronged him.
He came on to Cambridge in April, 1875, to go witli
me to the centennial ceremonies at Concord in celebra
tion of the battle of the Minute Men with the British
troops a hundred years before. We both had special
invitations, including passage from Boston ; but I said,
Why bother to go into Boston when we could just as
well take the train for Concord at the Cambridge sta
tion ? He equally decided that it would be absurd ;
so we breakfasted deliberately, and then walked to the
station, reasoning of many things as usual. When the
train stopped, we found it packed inside and out. Peo
ple stood dense on the platforms of the cars; to our
startled eyes they seemed to project from the windows,
and unless memory betrays me they lay strewn upon
the roofs like brakemen slain at the post of duty.
343
LITEEAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
WhetKer this was really so or not, it is certain that
the train presented an impenetrable front even to our
imagination, and we left it to go its way without the
slightest effort to board. We remounted the fame-worn
steps of Porter's Station, and began exploring North
Cambridge for some means of transportation overland
to Concord, for we were that far on the road by which
the British went and came on the day of the battle.
The liverymen whom we appealed to received us, some
with compassion, some with derision, but in either
mood convinced us that we could not have hired a cat
to attempt our conveyance, much less a horse, or vehicle
of any description. It was a raw, windy day, very
unlike the exceptionally hot April day when the routed
redcoats, pursued by the Colonials, fled panting back to
Boston, with u their tongues hanging out like dogs,'*
but we could not take due comfort in the vision of
their discomfiture ; we could almost envy them, for they
had at least got to Concord. A swift procession of
coaches, carriages, and buggies, all going to Concord,
passed us, inert and helpless, on the sidewalk in the
peculiarly cold mud of l^orth Cambridge. We began
to wonder if we might not stop one of them and bribe
it to take us, but we had not the courage to try, and
Clemens seized the opportunity to begin suffering with
an acute indigestion, which gave his humor a very dis
mal cast, I felt keenly the shame of defeat, and the
guilt of responsibility for our failure, and when a gay
party of students came toward us on the top of a tally-
ho, luxuriously empty inside, we felt that our chance
had come, and our last chance. He said that if I
would stop them and tell them who I was they would
gladly, perhaps proudly, give us passage; I contended
that if with his far vaster renown he would approach
them, our success would be assured. While we stood,
344
MY MARK TWAIN
lost in this " contest of civilities," the coach passed us,
with gay notes blown from the horns of the students,
and then Clemens started in pursuit, encouraged with
shouts from the merry party who could not imagine
who was trying to run them down, to a rivalry in speed.
The unequal match could end only in one way, and I
am glad I cannot recall what he said wrhen he came
back to me. Since then I have often wondered at the
grief which would have wrung those blithe young
hearts if they could have known that they might have
had the company of Mark Twain to Concord that day
and did not.
We living about, unavailingly, in the bitter wind a
while longer, and then slowly, very slowly, made our
way home. We wished to pass as much time as pos
sible, in order to give probability to the deceit we in
tended to practise, for we could not bear to own our
selves baffled in our boasted wisdom of taking the train
at Porter's Station, and had agreed to say that we had
been to Concord and got back. Even after coming
home to my house, we felt that our statement would
be wanting in verisimilitude without further delay,
and we crept quietly into my library, and made up
a roaring fire on the hearth, and thawed ourselves out
in the heat of it before we regained our courage for
the undertaking. With all these precautions we failed,
for when our statement was imparted to the proposed
victim she instantly pronounced it unreliable, and we
\vere left with it on our hands intact. I think the
humor of this situation was finally a greater pleasure
to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord would have
been; only a few wreeks before his death he laughed
our defeat over with one of my family in Bermuda, and
exulted in our prompt detection.
XI
FKOM our joint experience in failing I argue that
Clernens's affection for me must have been great to en
able him to condone in me the final defection which
was apt to be the end of our enterprises. I have fancied
that I presented to him a surface of such entire trust
worthiness that he could not imagine the depths of un
reliability beneath it; and that never realizing it, he
always broke through with fresh surprise but unim
paired faith. lie liked, beyond all things, to push an
affair to the bitter end, and the end was never too bitter
unless it brought grief or harm to another. Once in
a telegraph office at a railway station he was treated
with such insolent neglect by the young lady in charge,
who was preoccupied in a flirtation with a " gentleman
friend," that emulous of the public spirit which he
admired in the English, he told her he should report
her to her superiors, and (probably to her astonish
ment) he did so. lie went back to Hartford, and in
due time the poor girl came to me in terror and in
tears ; for I had abetted Clemens in his action, and had
joined my name to his in his appeal to the authorities.
She was threatened with dismissal unless she made
full apology to him and brought back assurance of its
acceptance. I felt able to give this, and, of course, he
eagerly approved ; I think he telegraphed his approval.
Another time, some years afterward, we sat down to
gether in places near the end of a car, and a brakeman
346
MY MARK TWAIN
came in looking for his official note-book. Clemens
found that he had sat down upon it, and handed it to
him; the man scolded him very abusively, and came
back again and again, still scolding him for having no
more sense than to sit down on a note-book. The patience
of Clemens in bearing it was so angelic that I saw fit
to comment, " I suppose you will report this fellow."
" Yes," he answered, slowly and sadly. " That's what
I should have done once. But now I remember that he
gets twenty dollars a month."
Nothing could have been wiser, nothing tenderer,
and his humanity was not for humanity alone. He
abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsman in
a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when I met
him in the country he had just been sickened by the
success of a gunner in bringing down a blackbird, and
he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay
throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as
he might have given a wounded child. I find this a fit
place to say that his mind and soul were with those
who do the hard work of the world, in fear of those
who give them a chance for their livelihoods and un
derpay them all they can. He never went so far in
socialism as I have gone, if he went that way at all,
but he was fascinated with Looking Backward and had
Bellamy to visit him; and from the first he had a
luminous vision of organized labor as the only pres
ent help for working - men. He would show that
side with such clearness and such force that you
could not say anything in hopeful contradiction ; he
saw with that relentless insight of his that in the
Unions was the working-man's only present hope of
standing up like a man against money and the power
of it. There was a time when I was afraid that his
eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in the
347
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
very last talk I heard from him I found that I was
wrong, and that this groat humorist was as great a
humanist as ever. I wish that all the work-folk could
know this, and could know him their friend in life as
lie was in literature ; as he was in such a glorious gospel
of equality as the Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's
Court.
XII
WHETHER I will or no I must let things come into
my story thought-wise, as he would have let them, for
I cannot remember them in their order. One night,
while we were giving a party, he suddenly stormed in
with a friend of his and mine, Mr. Twichell, and im
mediately began to eat and drink of our supper, for
they had come straight to our house from walking to
Boston, or so great a part of the way as to be ahungered
and athirst. I can see him now as he stood up in the
midst of our friends, with his head thrown back, and
in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters without
which no party in Cambridge was really a party, ex
ulting in the tale of his adventure, which had abounded
in the most original characters and amusing incidents
at every mile of their progress. They had broken their
journey with a night's rest, and they had helped them
selves lavishly out by rail in the last half; but still it
had been a mighty walk to do in two days. Clemens
was a great walker in those years, and was always tell
ing of his tramps with Air. Twichell to Talcott's Tower,
ten miles out of Hartford. As he walked of course
he talked, and of course he smoked. Whenever he had
been a few days with us, the whole house had to be aired,
for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime.
He always went to bed with a cigar in his mouth, and
sometimes, mindful of my fire insurance, I went up
and took it away, still burning, after he had fallen
349
LITERAET FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
asleep. I do not know how much a man may smoke
and live, but apparently he smoked as much as a man
could, for he smoked incessantly.
He did not care much to meet people, as I fancied,
and we were greedy of him for ourselves; he was
precious to us; and I would not have exposed him to
the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which
might not have appreciated him at, say, his transat
lantic value. In America his popularity was as instant
as it was vast. But it must be acknowledged that for
a much longer time here than in England polite learn
ing hesitated his praise. In England rank, fashion,
and culture rejoiced in him. Lord mayors, lord
chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were his
hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold
genius captivated the favor of periodicals which spurn
ed the rest of our nation. But in his own country
it was different. In proportion as people thought
themselves refined they questioned that quality which
all recognize in him now, but which was then the in
spired knowledge of the simple-hearted multitude. I
went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think
Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell made less.
He stopped as if with the long Semitic curve of Clem-
ens's nose, which in the indulgence of his passion for
finding every one more or less a Jew he pronounced
unmistakably racial. It was two of my most fastidious
Cambridge friends who accepted him with the Eng
lish, the European entirety — namely, Charles Eliot
Norton and Professor Erancis J. Child. Norton was
then newly back from a long sojourn abroad, and his
judgments were delocalized. He met Clemens as if
they had both been in England, and rejoiced in his
bold freedom from environment, and in the rich variety
and boundless reach of his talk. Child was of a per-
350
MY MARK TWAIN
sonal liberty as great in its fastidious way as that of
Clemens himself, and though lie knew him only at
second hand, he exulted in the most audacious instance
of his grotesquery, as I shall have to tell by-and-by,
almost solely. I cannot say just why Clemens seemed
not to hit the favor of our community of scribes and
scholars, as Bret ITarte had done, when he came on
from California, and swept them before him, disrupt
ing their dinners and delaying their lunches with im
punity; but it is certain he did not, and I had better
say so.
I am surprised to find from the bibliographical au
thorities that it was so late as 1875 when he came with
the manuscript of Tom Sawyer, and asked me to read
it, as a friend and critic, and not as an editor. I have
an impression that this was at Mrs. Clemens's instance
in his own uncertainty about printing it. She trusted
me, I can say with a satisfaction few things now give
me, to be her husband's true and cordial adviser, and
I was so. I believe I never failed him in this part,
though in so many of our enterprises and projects I
was false as water through my temperamental love of
backing out of any undertaking. I believe this never
ceased to astonish him, and it has always astonished
me; it appears to me quite out of character; though
it is certain that an undertaking, when I have en
tered upon it, holds me rather than I it. But how-
.ever this immaterial matter may be, I am glad
to remember that I thoroughly liked Tom Sawyer,
and said so with every possible amplification. Very
likely, I also made my suggestions for its improvement ;
I could not have been a real critic without that ; and I
have no doubt they were gratefully accepted and, I
hope, never acted upon. I went with him to the horse-
ear station in Harvard Square, as my frequent wont
351
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
was, and put him aboard a car with his MS. in his
hand, stayed and reassured, so far as I counted, concern
ing it. I do not know what his misgivings were; per
haps they were his wife's misgivings, for she wished
him to be known not only for the wild and boundless
humor that was in him, but for the beauty and tender
ness and " natural piety " ; and she would not have had
him judged by a too close fidelity to the rude conditions
of Tom Sawyer's life. This is the meaning that I read
into the fact of his coining to me with those doubts.
xm
CLEMEXS had then and for many years the habit of
writing to nie about what he was doing, and still more
of what he was experiencing. Nothing struck his im
agination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished
to write me of it, and he wrote with the greatest ful
ness and a lavish dramatization, sometimes to the
length of twenty or forty pages, so that I have now
perhaps fifteen hundred pages of his letters. They
will no doubt some day be published, but I am not even
referring to them in these records, which I think had
best come to the reader with an old man's faltcrings
and uncertainties. With his frequent absences and my
own abroad, and the intrusion of calamitous cares, the
rich tide of his letters was more and more interrupted.
At times it almost ceased, and then it would come
again, a torrent. In the very last weeks of his life
he burst forth, and, though too weak himself to write,
he dictated his rage with me for recommending to him
a certain author whose truthfulness he could not deny,
but whom he hated for his truthfulness to sordid and
ugly conditions. At heart Clemens was romantic, and
he would have had the world of fiction stately and
handsome and whatever the real world w^as not; but
he was not romanticistic, and he was too helplessly an
artist not to wish his own work to show life as he had
seen it. I was preparing to rap him back for these
letters when I read that he had got home to die; he
\vould have liked the rapping back.
353
LITEEARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
He liked coming to Boston, especially for those
luncheons and dinners in which the fertile hospitality
of our publisher, Osgood, abounded. He dwelt equi
distant from Boston and New York, and he had special
friends in New York, but he said he much preferred
coining to Boston; of late years he never went there,
and he had lost the habit of it long before he came
Lome from Europe to live in New York. At these
feasts, which were often of after - dinner - speaking
measure, he could always be trusted for something of
amazing delight-fulness. Once, when Osgood could
think of no other occasion for a dinner, he gave him
self a birthday dinner, and asked his friends and au
thors. The beautiful and splendid trooper-like Waring
was there, and I recall how in the long, rambling speech
in which Clemens went round the table hitting every
head at it, and especially visiting Osgood with thanks
for his ingenious pretext for our entertainment, he
congratulated Waring upon his engineering genius and
his hypnotic control of municipal governments. He
said that if there was a plan for draining a city at a
cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water in
the down-hill course of the sewers, Waring would come
with a plan to drain that town up-hill at twice the cost
and carry it through the Common Council without op
position. It is hard to say whether the time was gladder
at these dinners, or at the small lunches at which Os
good and Aldrich and I foregathered with him and
talked the afternoon away till well toward the winter
twilight.
He was a great figure, an'd the principal figure, at
one of the first of the now worn-out Authors' Headings,
which was held in the Boston Museum to aid a Long
fellow memorial. It was the late George Parsons La-
throp (everybody seems to be late in these sad days)
354
who imagined the reading, but when it came to a price
for seats I can always claim the glory of fixing it at five
dollars. The price if not the occasion proved irre
sistible, and the museum was packed from the floor
to the topmost gallery. Norton presided, and when
it came Clemeus's turn to read he introduced him with
such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give,
but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those
lapses of tact which are the peculiar peril of people
of the greatest tact. He was reminded of Darwin's
delight in Mark Twain, and how Avhen he came from
his long day's exhausting study, and sank into bed at
midnight, he took up a volume of Mark Twain, whose
books he always kept on a table beside him, and what
ever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil,
he felt secure of a good night's rest from it. A sort
of blank ensued which Clemens filled in the only pos
sible way. He said he should always be glad that he
had contributed to the repose of that great man, whom
science owed so much, and then without waiting for the
joy in every breast to burst forth, he began to read.
It was curious to watch his triumph with the house.
His carefully studied effects would reach the first rows
in the orchestra first, and ripple in laughter back to the
standees against the wall, and then with a fine resur
gence come again to the rear orchestra seats, and
so rise from gallery to gallery till it fell back, a
cataract of applause from the topmost rows of seats.
He was such a practised speaker that he knew all
the stops of that simple instrument man, and there
is no doubt that these results were accurately intended
from his unerring knowledge. He was the most con
summate public performer I ever saw, and it was an
incomparable pleasure to hear him lecture ; on the plat
form he was the great and finished actor which he prob-
24 355
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
ably would not have been on the stage. He was fond
of private theatricals, and liked to play in them with
his children and their friends, in dramatizations of such
stories of his as The Prince and the Pauper; but I
never saw him in any of these scenes. When he read
his manuscript to you, it was with a thorough, how
ever involuntary, recognition of its dramatic qualities ;
he held that an actor added fully half to the character
the author created. With my own hurried and half
hearted reading of passages which I wished to try on
him from unprinted chapters (say, out of The Undis
covered Country or A Modern Instance} he said frank
ly that my reading could spoil anything. He was
realistic, but he was essentially histrionic, and he was
rightly so. What we have strongly conceived we ought
to make others strongly imagine, and we ought to use
every genuine art to that end.
XIV
THERE came a time wlien the lecturing which had
been the joy of his prime became his loathing, loathing
unutterable, and when he renounced it with indescrib
able violence. Yet he was always hankering for those
fleshpots whose savor lingered on his palate and filled
his nostrils after his withdrawal from the platform.
The Authors' Readings when they had won their brief
popularity abounded in suggestion for him. Reading
from one's book was not so bad as giving a lecture
written for a lecture's purpose, and he was willing at
last to compromise. He had a magnificent scheme for
touring the country with Aldrich and Mr. G. W. Cable
and myself, in a private car, with a cook of our own,
and every facility for living on the fat of the land.
We should read only four times a week, in an enter
tainment that should not last more than an hour and
a half. He would be the impresario, and would guar
antee us others at least seventy-five dollars a day, and
pay every expense of the enterprise, which he pro
visionally called the Circus, himself. But Aldrich and
I were now no longer in those earlier thirties when
we so cheerfully imagined Memorable Murders for sub
scription publication ; we both abhorred public appear
ances, and, at any rate, I was going to Europe for a
year. So the plan fell through except as regarded Mr.
Cable, who, in his way, was as fine a performer as
Clemens, and could both read and sing the matter of
357
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
his books. On a far less stupendous scale they two
made the rounds of the great lecturing circuit together.
But I believe a famous lecture-manager had charge of
them and travelled with them.
He was a most sanguine man, a most amiable per
son, and such a believer in fortune that Clemens used
to say of him, as he said of one of his early publishers,
that you could rely upon fifty per cent, of everything
he promised. I myself many years later became a
follower of this hopeful prophet, and I can testify that
in my case at least he was able to keep ninety-nine,
and even a hundred, per cent, of his word. It was I
who was much nearer failing of mine, for I promptly
began to lose sleep from the nervous stress of my lectur
ing and from the gratifying but killing receptions after
ward, and I was truly in that state from insomnia
which Clemens recognized in the brief letter I got from
him in the Western city, after half a dozen wakeful
nights. He sardonically congratulated me on having
gone into " the lecture field," and then he said : " I
know where you are now. You are in hell."
It was this perdition which he re-entered when he
undertook that round-the-world lecturing tour for the
payment of the debts left to him by the bankruptcy of
his firm in the publishing business. It was not purely
perdition for him, or, rather, it was perdition for only
one-half of him, the author-half; for the actor-half it
was paradise. The author who takes up lecturing with
out the ability to give histrionic support to the literary
reputation which he brings to the crude test of his
reader's eyes and ears, invokes a peril and a mis
ery unknown to the lecturer who has made his first
public from the platform. Clemens was victori
ous on the platform from the beginning, and it
would be folly to pretend that he did not exult in
358
MY MAKK TWAIN
his triumphs there. But I suppose, with the wearing
nerves of middle life, he hated more and more the
personal swarming of interest upon him, and all the
inevitable clatter of the thing. Yet he faced it, and he
labored round our tiresome globe that he might pay the
uttermost farthing of debts which he had not know
ingly contracted, the debts of his partners who had
meant well and done ill, not because they were evil,
but because they were unwise, and as unfit for their
work as he was. " Pay what thou owest." That is
right, even when thou owcst it by the error of others,
and even when thou owest it to a bank, which had not
lent it from love of thee, but in the hard line of busi
ness and thy need.
Clemens's behavior in this matter redounded to his
glory among the nations of the whole earth, and es
pecially in this nation, so wrapped in commerce and
so little used to honor among its many thieves. He had
behaved like Walter Scott, as millions rejoiced to know,
who had not known how Walter Scott had behaved till
they knew it was like Clemens. No doubt it will bo
put to his credit in the books of the Recording Angel,
but what the Judge of all the Earth will say of it at
the Last Day there is no telling. I should not be sur
prised if He accounted it of less merit than some other
things that Clemens did and was: less than his abhor
rence of the Spanish War, and the destruction of the
South-African republics, and our deceit of the Fili
pinos, and his hate of slavery, and his payment of his
portion of our race's debt to the race of the colored
student whom he saw through college, and his support
of a poor artist for three years in Paris, and his loan
of opportunity to the youth who became the most brill
iant of our actor-dramatists, and his eager pardon of
the thoughtless girl who was near paying the penalty
359
LITEEAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
of her impertinence with the loss of her place, and his
remembering that the insolent brakeman got so few
dollars a month, and his sympathy for working-men
standing up to money in their Unions, and even his
pity for the wounded bird throbbing out its little life
on the grass for the pleasure of the cruel fool who shot
it. These and the thousand other charities and benefi
cences in which he abounded, openly or secretly, may
avail him more than the discharge of his firm's liabili
ties with the Judge of all the Earth, who surely will do
right, but whose measures and criterions no man knows,
and I least of all men.
He made no great show of sympathy with people in
their anxieties, but it never failed, and at a time when
I lay sick for many weeks his letters were of comfort
to those who feared I might not rise again. His hand
was out in help for those who needed help, and in kind
ness for those who needed kindness. There remains in
my mind the dreary sense of a long, long drive to the
uttermost bounds of the South End at Boston, where he
went to call upon some obscure person whose claim
stretched in a lengthening chain from his early days
in Missouri — a most inadequate person, in whose vac
uity the gloom of the dull day deepened till it was
dmost too deep for tears. He bore the ordeal with
grim heroism, and silently smoked away the sense of
it, as we drove back to Cambridge, in his slippered feet,
sombrely musing, sombrely swearing. But he knew he
had done the right, the kind thing, and he was content.
He came the whole way from Hartford to go with me
to a friendless play of mine, which Alessandro Salvini
was giving in a series of matinees to houses never en
larging themselves beyond the count of the brave two
hundred who sat it through, and he stayed my fainting
spirit with a cheer beyond flagons, joining me in my
360
MY MAEK TWAIN
joke at the misery of it, and carrying the fun
farther.
Before that he had come to witness the aesthetic
suicide of Anna Dickinson, who had been a flaming
light of the political platform in the war days, and
had been left by them consuming in a hapless am
bition for the theatre. The poor girl had had a play
written especially for her, and as Anne Boleyn she
ranted and exhorted through the five acts, drawing ever
nearer the utter defeat of the anti-climax. We could
hardly look at each other for pity, Clemens sitting there
in the box he had taken, with his shaggy head out over
the corner and his slippered feet curled under him:
he either went to a place in his slippers or he carried
them with him, and put them on as soon as he could
put off his boots. When it was so that we could not
longer follow her failure and live, he began to talk of
the absolute close of her career which the thing was,
and how probably she had no conception that it was
the end. He philosophized the mercifulness of the fact,
and of the ignorance of most of us, when mortally sick
or fatally wounded. We think it is not the end, be
cause we have never ended before, and we do not see
how we can end. Some can push by the awful hour
and live again, but for Anna Dickinson there could
be, and was, no such palingenesis. Of course we got
that solemn joy out of reading her fate aright which
is the compensation of the wise spectator in witness
ing the inexorable doom of others.
XV
WHEN Messrs. Houghton & Mifflin became owners of
The Atlantic Monthly, Mr. Houghton fancied having
some breakfasts and dinners, which should bring the
publisher and the editor face to face with the con
tributors, who were bidden from far and near. Of
course, the subtle fiend of advertising, who has now
grown so unblushing bold, lurked under the covers at
these banquets, and the junior partner and the young
editor had their joint and separate fine anguishes of
misgiving as to the taste and the principle of them;
but they were really very simple-hearted and honestly
meant hospitalities, and they prospered as they ought,
aiul gave great pleasure and no pain. I forget some
of the " emergent occasions," but I am sure of a birth
day dinner most unexpectedly accepted by Whitticr,
and a birthday luncheon to Mrs. Stowe, and I think a
birthday dinner to Longfellow; but the passing years
have left me in the dark as to the pretext of that supper
at which Clemens made his awful speech, and came so
near being the death of us all. At the breakfasts and
luncheons we had the pleasure of our lady contributors'
company, but that night there were only men, and be
cause of our great strength we survived.
I suppose the year was about 1879, but here the
almanac is unimportant, and I can only say that it was
after Clemens had become a very valued contributor
of the magazine, where he found himself to his own
362
MY MARK TWAIN"
great explicit satisfaction. He had jubilantly accepted
our invitation, and had promised a speech, which it
appeared afterward he had prepared with unusual care
and confidence. It was his custom always to think out
his speeches, mentally wording them, and then memo
rizing them by a peculiar system of mnemonics which
he had invented. On the dinner-table a certain suc
cession of knife, spoon, salt-cellar, and butter-plate sym
bolized a train of ideas, and on the billiard-table a ball,
a cue, and a piece of chalk served the same purpose.
With a diagram of these printed on the brain he had
full command of the phrases which his excogitation
had attached to them, and which embodied the ideas in
perfect form. He believed he had been particularly
fortunate in his notion for the speech of that evening,
and he had worked it out in joyous self-reliance. It
was the notion of three tramps, three dead-beats, visit
ing a California mining-camp, and imposing themselves
upon the innocent miners as respectively Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver
Wendell Holmes. The humor of the conception must
prosper or must fail according to the mood of the.
hearer, but Clemens felt sure of compelling this to
sympathy, and he looked forward to an unparalleled
triumph.
But there were two things that he had not taken into
account. One was the species of religious veneration
in which these men were held by those nearest them,
a thing that I should not be able to realize to people
remote from them in time and place. They were men
of extraordinary dignity, of the thing called presence,
for want of some clearer word, so that no one could well
approach them in a personally light or trifling spirit.
I do not suppose that anybody more truly valued them
or more piously loved them than Clemens himself, but
363
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
the intoxication of his fancy carried him beyond the
bounds of that regard, and emboldened him to the
other thing which he had not taken into account — name
ly, the immense hazard of working his fancy out before
their faces, and expecting them to enter into the delight
of it. If neither Emerson, nor Longfellow, nor Holmes
had been there, the scheme might possibly have carried,
but even this is doubtful, for those who so devoutly
honored them would have overcome their horror with
difficulty, and perhaps would not have overcome it at
all.
The publisher, wTith a modesty very ungrateful to
me, had abdicated his office of host, and I was the
hapless president, fulfilling the abhorred function of
calling people to their feet and making them speak.
When I came to Clemens I introduced him •with the
cordial admiring I had for him as one of my greatest
contributors and dearest friends. Here, I said, in sum,
was a humorist who never left you hanging your head
for having enjoyed his joke; and then the amazing
mistake, the bewildering blunder, the cruel catastrophe
was upon us. I believe that after the scope of the
burlesque made itself clear, there was no one there, in
cluding the burlesquer himself, who w^as not smitten
with a desolating dismay. There fell a silence, weigh
ing many tons to the square inch, which deepened from
moment to moment, and was broken only by the hys
terical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest,
whose name shall not be handed down to infamy. No
body knew whether to look at the speaker or down at
his plate. I chose my plate as the least affliction, and
so I do not know how Clemens looked, except when I
stole a glance at him, and saw him standing solitary
amid his appalled and appalling listeners, with his joke
dead on his hands. From a first glance at the great
364
MY MARK TWAIN
three whom his jest had made its theme, I was aware
of Longfellow sitting upright, and regarding the hu
morist with an air of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily
writing on his menu, with a well-feigned effect of pre
occupation, and of Emerson, holding his elbows, and
listening with a sort of Jovian oblivion of this nether
world in that lapse of memory which saved him in
those later years from so much bother. Clemens must
have dragged his joke to the climax and left it there,
but I cannot say this from any sense of the fact. Of
what happened afterward at the table where the im
mense, the wholly innocent, the truly unimagined af
front was offered, I have no longer the least remem
brance. I next remember being in a room of the hotel,
where Clemens was not to sleep, but to toss in despair,
and Charles Dudley Warner's saying, in the gloom,
" Well, Mark, you're a funny fellow." It was as well
as anything else he could have said, but Clemens seemed
unable to accept the tribute.
I stayed the night with him, and the next morning,
after a haggard breakfast, we drove about and he made
some purchases of bric-a-brac for his house in Hart
ford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever
the soul of man was. He went home by an early train,
and he lost no time in writing back to the three divine
personalities which he had so involuntarily seemed to
flout. They all wrote back to him, making it as light
for him as they could. I have heard that Emerson was
a good deal mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness
asked, Who was this gentleman who appeared to think
he had offered him some sort of annoyance ? But I
am not sure that this is accurate. What I am sure of
is that Longfellow, a few days after, in my study,
stopped before a photograph of Clemens and said, " Ah,
he is a wag!" and nothing more. Holmes told me,
365
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
with deep emotion, such as a brother humorist might
well feel, that he had not lost an instant in replying to
Clement's letter, and assuring him that there had not
heen the least offence, and entreating him never to
think of the matter again. " He said that he was a
fool, but he was God's fool," Holmes quoted from the
letter, with a true sense of the pathos and the humor of
the self-abasement.
To me Clemens wrote a week later, " It doesn't get
any better; it burns like fire." But now I understand
that it was not shame that burnt, but rage for a blun
der which he had so incredibly committed. That to
have conceived of those men, the most dignified in our
literature, our civilization, as impersonable by three
hoboes, and then to have imagined that he could ask
them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was
a break, lie saw too late, for which there was no repair.
Yet the time came, and not so very long afterward,
when some mention was made of the incident as a mis
take, and he said, with all his fierceness, " But I don't
admit that it was a mistake," and it was not so in the
minds of all witnesses at second hand. The morning
after the dreadful dinner there came a glowing note
from Professor Child, who had read the newspaper re
port of it, praising Clernens's burlesque as the richest
piece of humor in the world, and betraying no sense
of incongruity in its perpetration in the presence of its
victims. I think it must always have ground in Clein-
ens's soul, that he was the prey of circumstances, and
that if he had some more favoring occasion he could
retrieve his loss in it by giving the thing the right
setting. !N"ot more than two or three years ago, he
came to try me as to trying it again at a meeting of
newspaper men in Washington. I had to own my fears,
while I alleged Child's note on the other hand, but in
3G6
MY MAKE TWAIN
the end he did not try it with the newspaper men. I
do not know whether he has ever printed it or not, but
since the thing happened I have often wondered how
much offence there really was in it. I am not sure but
the horror of the spectators read more .indignation into
the subjects of the hapless drolling than they felt. But
it must have been difficult for them to bear it with
equanimity. To be sure, they were not themselves
mocked; the joke was, of course, beside them; never
theless, their personality was trifled with, and I could
only end by reflecting that if I had been in their place
I should not have liked it myself. Clemens would have
liked it himself, for he had the heart for that sort of
wild play, and he so loved a joke that even if it took
the form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he would
have loved it. But perhaps this burlesque was not a
good joke.
XVI
CLEMENS was oftenest at my house in Cambridge, but
he was also sometimes at my house in Belmont ; when,
after a year in Europe, we went to live in Boston, he
was more rarely with us. We could never be long to
gether without something out of the common happen
ing, and one day something far out of the common
happened, which fortunately refused the nature of
absolute tragedy, while remaining rather the saddest
sort of comedy. We were looking out of my library
window on that view of the Charles which I was so
proud of sharing with my all-but-next-door neighbor,
Doctor Holmes, when another friend who was with us
called out with curiously impersonal interest, " Oh,
see that woman getting into the water!" This would
have excited curiosity and alarmed anxiety far less
lively than ours, and Clemens and I rushed down
stairs and out through my basement and back gate.
At the same time -a coachman came out of a stable
next door, and grappled by the shoulders a woman who
was somewhat deliberately getting down the steps to
the water over the face of the embankment. Before we
could reach them he had pulled her up to the drive
way, and stood holding her there while she crazily
grieved at her rescue. As soon as he saw us he went
back into his stable, and left us with the poor wild
creature on our hands. She was not very young and
not very pretty, and we could not have flattered our-
368
MY MARK TWAIN
selves with the notion of anything romantic in her sui
cidal mania, but we could take her on the broad human
level, and on this we proposed to escort her up Beacon
Street till we could give her into the keeping of one
of those kindly policemen whom our neighborhood
knew. Naturally there was no policeman known to
us or unknown the whole way to the Public Garden.
We had to circumvent our charge in her present design
of drowning herself, and walk her past the streets cross
ing Beacon to the river. At these points it needed con
siderable reasoning to overcome her wish and some ac
tive manoeuvring in both of us to enforce our arguments.
Xobody else appeared to be interested, and though we-
did not court publicity in the performance of the duty
so strangely laid upon us, still it was rather disap
pointing to be so entirely ignored.
There are some four or five crossings to the river
between 302 Beacon Street and the Public Garden,
and the suggestions at our command were pretty well
exhausted by the time we reached it. Still the expected
policeman was nowhere in sight; but a brilliant thought
occurred to Clemens. He asked me where the nearest
police station was, and when I told him, he started off
at his highest speed, leaving me in sole charge of our
hapless ward. All my powers of suasion were now
taxed to the utmost, and I began attracting attention
as a short, stout gentleman in early middle life en
deavoring to distrain a respectable female of her per
sonal liberty, when his accomplice had abandoned him
to his wicked design. After a much longer time than
I thought / should have taken to get a policeman from
the station, Clemens reappeared in easy conversation
with an officer who had probably realized that he was
in the company of Mark Twain, and was in no hurry
to end the interview. He took possession of our cap-
369
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
tivc, and we saw her no more. I now wonder that with
our joint instinct for failure we ever got rid of her;
but I ana sure we did, and few things in life have given
me greater relief. When we got back to my house we
found the friend we had left there quite unruffled and
not much concerned to know the facts of our adventure.
My impression is that he had been taking a nap on
my lounge; he appeared refreshed and even gay; but
if I am inexact in these details he is alive to refute me.
XVII
A LITTLE after this Clemens went abroad with his
family, and lived several years in Germany. His let
ters still came, but at longer intervals, and the thread
of our intimate relations was inevitably broken. He
would write me when something I had written pleased
him, or when something signal occurred to him, or
some political or social outrage stirred him to wrath,
and v he wished to free his mind in pious profanity.
During this sojourn he came near dying of pneumonia
in Berlin, and he had slight relapses from it after com
ing home. In Berlin also he had the honor of dining
with the German Emperor at the table of a cousin
married to a high officer of the court. Clemens was a
man to enjoy such a distinction ; he knew how to take
it as a delegated recognition from the German people;
but as coming from a rather cockahoop sovereign who
had as yet only his sovereignty to value himself upon,
he was not very proud of it. He expressed a quiet dis
dain of the event as between the imperiality and him
self, on whom it was supposed to confer such glory,
crowning his life with the topmost leaf of laurel. He
was in the same mood in his account of an English
dinner many years before, where there was a " little
Scotch lord " present, to whom the English tacitly re
ferred Clemens's talk, and laughed when the lord laugh
ed, and were grave when he failed to smile. Of all the
men I have known he was the farthest from a snob,
25 371
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
though he valued recognition, and liked the flattery of
the fashionable fair when it came in his way. He
would not go out of his way for it, but like most able
and brilliant men he loved the minds of women, their
wit, their agile cleverness, their sensitive perception,
their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they
would say, and their pretty, temerarious defiances.
He had, of course, the keenest sense of what was truly
dignified and truly undignified in people; but he was
not really interested in what we call society affairs ;
they scarcely existed for him, though his books witness
how he abhorred the dreadful fools who through some
chance of birth or wealth hold themselves different from
other men.
Commonly he did not keep things to himself, es
pecially dislikes and condemnations. Upon most cur
rent events he had strong opinions, and he uttered them
strongly. After a while he was silent in them, but if
you tried him you found him in them still. He was
tremendously worked up by a certain famous trial, as
most of us were who lived in the time of it. He believed
the accused guilty, but when we met some months after
it was over, and I tempted him to speak his mind upon
it, he would only say. The man had suffered enough ;
as if the man had expiated his wrong, and he was not
going to do anything to renew his penalty. I found
that very curious, very delicate. His continued blame
could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but he felt
it his duty to forbear it.
He was apt to wear himself out in the vehemence of
his resentments; or, he had so spent himself in utter
ing them that he had literally nothing more to say.
You could offer Clemens offences that would anger
other men and he did not mind ; he would account for
them from human nature; but if he thought you had
372
MY MAEK TWAIN
in any way played him false you were anathema and
maranatha forever. Yet not forever, perhaps, for by-
and-by, after years, he would be silent. There were
two men, half a generation apart in their succession,
whom he thought equally atrocious in their treason to
him, and of whom he used to talk terrifyingly, even
after they were out of the world. He went farther than
Heine, who said that he forgave his enemies, but not
till they were dead. Clemens did not forgive his dead
enemies; their death seemed to deepen their crimes,
like a base evasion, or a cowardly attempt to escape;
he pursued them to the grave; he would like to dig
them up and take vengeance upon their clay. So he said,
but no doubt he would not have hurt them if he had
had them living before him. He was generous with
out stint; he trusted without measure, but where his
generosity was abused, or his trust betrayed, he was a
fire of vengeance, a consuming flame of suspicion
that no sprinkling of cool patience from others could
quench ; it had to burn itself out. He was eagerly and
lavishly hospitable, but if a man seemed willing to bat
ten on him, or in any way to lie down upon him, Clem
ens despised him unutterably. In. his frenzies of re
sentment or suspicion he would not, and doubtless could
not, listen to reason. But if between the paroxysms
he were confronted with the facts he would own them,
no matter how much they told against him. At one
period he fancied that a certain newspaper was hound
ing him with biting censure and poisonous paragraphs,
and he was filling himself up with wrath to be duly
discharged on the editor's head. Later, he wrote me
with a humorous joy in his mistake that Warner had
advised him to have the paper watched for these in
juries. He had done so, and how many mentions of
him did I reckon he had found in three months ? Just
373
LITERARY FEIEXDS AXD ACQUAINTANCE
two, and they were rather indifferent than unfriendly.
So the paper was acquitted, and the editor's life was
spared. The wretch never knew how near he was to
losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and
a subsequent devotion to lasting infamy.
XVIII
His memory for favors was as good as for injuries,
and lie liked to return your friendliness with as loud
a baud of music as could be bought or bribed for the
occasion. All that you had to do was to signify that
you wanted his help. "When my father was consul at
Toronto during Arthur's administration, he fancied
that his place was in danger, and he appealed to me.
In turn I appealed to Clemens, bethinking myself of
his friendship with Grant and Grant's friendship with
Arthur. I asked him to write to Grant in my father's
behalf, but Xo, he answered me, I must come to Hart
ford, and we would go on to Xew York together and see
Grant personally. This was before, and long before,
Clemens became Grant's publisher and splendid bene
factor, but the men liked each other as such men could
not help doing. Clemens made the appointment, and
we went to find Grant in his business office, that place
where his business innocence was afterward so be
trayed. He was very simple and very cordial, and I
was instantly the more at home with him, because his
voice was the soft, rounded, Ohio River accent to which
my years were earliest used from my steamboating un
cles, my earliest heroes. When I stated my business he
merely said, Oh no ; that must not be ; he would write
to Mr. Arthur ; and he did so that day ; and my father
lived to lay down his office, when he tired of it, with no
urgence from above.
375
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
It is not irrelevant to Clemens to say that Grant
seemed to like finding himself in company with two
literary men, one of whom at least he could make sure
of, and unlike that silent man he was reputed, he talked
constantly, and so far as he might he talked literature.
At least he talked of John Phoenix, that delightfulest
of the early Pacific Slope humorists, whom he had
known under his real name of George II. Derby, when
they were fellow-cadets at West Point. It was mighty
pretty, as Pepys would say, to see the delicate deference
Clemens paid our plain hero, and the manly respect
with which he listened. While Grant talked, his lunch
eon was brought in from some unassuming restaurant
near by, and he asked us to join him in the baked
beans and coffee which were served us in a little room
out of the office with about the same circumstance as
at a railroad refreshment-counter. The baked beans
and coffee were of about the railroad - refreshment
quality; but eating them with Grant was like sitting
down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar,
or Alexander, or some other great Plutarchan cap
tain.
One of the highest satisfactions of Clemens's often
supremely satisfactory life was his relation to Grant.
It was his proud joy to tell how he found Grant about
to sign a contract for his book on certainly very good
terms, and said to him that he would himself publish
the book and give him a percentage three times as
large. He said Grant seemed to doubt whether he could
honorably withdraw from the negotiation at that point,
but Clemens overbore his scruples, and it was his un
paralleled privilege, his princely pleasure, to pay the
author a far larger check for his work than had ever
been paid to an author before. He valued even
more than this splendid opportunity the sacred mo-
376
MY MAKK TWAIN
ments in which their business brought him into the
presence of the slowly dying, heroically living man
whom he was so befriending; and he told me in
words which surely lost none of their simple pathos
through his report how Grant described his suffer
ing.
The prosperity of this venture was the beginning
of Clemens's adversity, for it led to excesses of enter
prise which were forms of dissipation. The young
sculptor who had come back to him from Paris mod
elled a small bust of Grant, which Clemens multiplied
in great numbers to his great loss, and the success of
Grant's book tempted him to launch on publishing seas
where his bark presently foundered. The first and
greatest of his disasters was the Life of Pope Leo
XIII., which he came to tell me of, when he had im
agined it, in a sort of delirious exultation. He had
no words in which to paint the magnificence of the
project, or to forecast its colossal success. It would
have a currency bounded only by the number of Cath
olics in Christendom. It would be translated into every
language which was anywhere written or printed; it
would be circulated literally in every country of the
globe, and Clemens's book agents would carry the pros
pectuses and then the bound copies of the work to the
ends of the whole earth. ~Not only would every Catholic
buy it, but every Catholic must, as he was a good Cath
olic, as he hoped to be saved. It was a magnificent
scheme, and it captivated me, as it had captivated
Clemens ; it dazzled us both, and neither of us saw the
fatal defect in it. We did not consider how often Cath
olics could not read, how often when they could, they
might not wish to read. The event proved that whether
they could read or not the immeasurable majority did
not wish to read the life of the Pope, though it was
377
LITE7UHY FRIENDS ANT) ACQUAINTANCE
written by a dignitary of the Church and issued to the
world with every sanction from the Vatican. The fail
ure was incredible to Clemens; his sanguine soul was
utterly confounded, and soon a silence fell upon it
where it had been so exuberantly jubilant.
XIX
THE occasions which brought us to 3Tew York to
gether were not nearly so frequent as those which
united us in Boston, but there was a dinner given him
by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity
of two men present, so different in everything but
their fatuity. One was the sweet old comedian
Billy Florence, who was urging the unsuccessful
dramatist across the table to write him a play about
Oliver Cromwell, and giving the reasons why he
thought himself peculiarly fitted to portray the char
acter of Cromwell. The other was a modestly millioned
rich man who was then only beginning to amass the
moneys afterward heaped so high, and was still in the
condition to be flattered by the condescension of a yet
greater millionaire. His contribution to our gayety
was the verbatim report of a call he had made upon
William II. Vanderbilt, whom he had found just about
starting out of town, with his trunks actually in the
front hall, but who had stayed to receive the narrator.
He had, in fact, sat down on one of the trunks, and
talked with the easiest friendliness, and quite, we were
given to infer, like an ordinary human being. Clemens
often kept on with some thread of the talk when we
came away from a dinner, but now he was silent, as if
" high sorrowful and cloyed " ; and it was not till well
afterward that I found he had noted the facts from the
bitterness with which he mocked the rich man, and the
pity he expressed for the actor.
379
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
He had begun before that to amass those evidences
against mankind which eventuated with him in his
theory of what he called " the damned human race."
This was not an expression of piety, but of the kind
contempt to which he was driven by our follies and
iniquities as he had observed them in himself as well
as in others. It was as mild a misanthropy, probably,
as ever caressed the objects of its malediction. But I
believe it was about the year 1900 that his sense of
our perdition became insupportable and broke out in
a mixed abhorrence and amusement which spared no
occasion, so that I could quite understand why Mrs.
Clemens should have found some compensation, when
kept to her room by sickness, in the reflection that now
she should not hear so much about " the damned human
race." He told of that with the same wild joy that he
told of overhearing her repetition of one of his most
inclusive profanities, and her explanation that she
meant him to hear it so that he might know how it
sounded. The contrast of the lurid blasphemy with
her heavenly whiteness should have been enough to
cure any one less grounded than he in what must be
owned was as fixed a habit as smoking with him. When
I first knew him he rarely vented his fury in that sort,
and I fancy he was under a promise to her which he
kept sacred till the wear and tear of his nerves with
advancing years disabled him. Then it would be like
him to struggle with himself till he could struggle no
longer and to ask his promise back, and it would be
like her to give it back. His profanity was the heri
tage of his boyhood and 3roung manhood in social con
ditions and under the duress of exigencies in which
everybody swore about as impersonally as he smoked.
It is best to recognize the fact of it, and I do so the
more readily because I cannot suppose the Kecording
380
Angel really minded it much more than that Guardian
Angel of his. It probably grieved them about equally,
but they could equally forgive it. Nothing came of his
pose regarding u the damned human race " except his
invention of the Human Race Luncheon Club. This
was confined to four persons who were never all got to
gether, and it soon perished of their indifference.
In the earlier days that I have more specially in
mind one of the questions that we used to debate a good
deal was whether every human motive was not selfish.
We inquired as to every impulse, the noblest, the holi
est in effect, and he found them in the last analysis
of selfish origin. Pretty nearly the whole time of a
certain railroad run from Xew York to Hartford was
taken up with the scrutiny of the self-sacrifice of a
mother for her child, of the abandon of the lover who
dies in saving his mistress from fire or flood, of the
hero's courage in the field and the martyr's at the stake.
Each he found springing from the unconscious love of
self and the dread of the greater pain which the self-
sacrificer would suffer in forbearing the sacrifice. If
we had any time left from this inquiry that day, he
must have devoted it to a high regret that Xapoleon
did not carry out his purpose of invading England, for
then he would have destroyed the feudal aristocracy, or
" reformed the lords," as it might be called now. He
thought that would have been an incalculable blessing
to the English people and the world. Clemens was
always beautifully and unfalteringly a republican.
ISTone of his occasional misgivings for America im
plicated a return to monarchy. Yet he felt passion
ately the splendor of the English monarchy, and there
was a time when lie gloried in that figurative poetry
by which the king was phrased as " the Majesty of
England." He rolled the words deep-throatedly out,
381
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
and exulted in their beauty as if it were beyond any
other glory of the world. He read, or read at, English
history a great deal, and one of the by-products of his
restless invention was a game of English Kings (like
the game of Authors) for children. I do not know
whether he ever perfected this, but I am quite sure it
was not put upon the market. Very likely he brought
it to a practicable stage, and then tired of it, as he was
apt to do in the ultimatum of his vehement under
takings.
XX
HE satisfied the impassioned demand of his nature
for incessant activities of every kind by taking a per
sonal as well as a pecuniary interest in the inventions
of others. At one moment " the damned human race "
was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding
brass without air bubbles in it; if this could once be
accomplished, as I understood, or misunderstood, brass
could be used in art-printing to a degree hitherto im
possible. I dare say I have got it wrong, but I am not
mistaken as to Clemens's enthusiasm for the process,
and his heavy losses in paying its way to ultimate fail
ure. He was simultaneously absorbed in the perfection
of a type-setting machine, which he was paying the
inventor a salary to bring to a perfection so expensive
that it was practically impracticable. We were both
printers by trade, and I could take the same interest
in this wonderful piece of mechanism that he could;
and it was so truly wonderful that it did everything
but walk and talk. Its ingenious creator was so bent
upon realizing the highest ideal in it that he produced
a machine of quite unimpeachable efficiency. But it
was so costly, when finished, that it could not be made
for less than twenty thousand dollars, if the parts were
made by hand. This sum was prohibitive of its intro
duction, unless the requisite capital could be found for
making the parts by machinery, and Clemens spent
many months in vainly trying to get this money to-
383 ^
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Aether. In the mean time simpler machines had been
invented and the market filled, and his investment of
three hundred thousand dollars in the beautiful miracle
remained permanent but not profitable. I once went
with him to witness its performance, and it did seem
to me the last word in its way, but it had been spoken
too exquisitely, too fastidiously. I never heard him
devote the inventor to the infernal gods, as he was apt
to do with the geniuses he lost money by, and so I think
he did not regard him as a traitor.
In these things, and in his other schemes for the
siibiti guadagni of the speculator and the " sudden mak
ing of splendid names " for the benefactors of our
species, Clemens satisfied the Colonel Sellers nature
in himself (from which he drew the picture of that
wild and lovable figure), and perhaps made as good
use of his money as he could. lie did not care much
for money in itself, but he luxuriated in the lavish use
of it, and he was as generous with it as ever a man was.
He liked giving it, but lie commonly wearied of giving
it himself, and wherever he lived he established an
almoner, whom he fully trusted to keep his left hand
ignorant of what his right hand was doing. I believe
he felt no finality in charity, but did it because in its
provisional way it was the only thing a man could do.
I never heard him go really into any sociological in
quiry, and I have a feeling that that sort of thing
baffled and dispirited him. No one can read The Con
necticut Yankee, and not be aware of the length and
breadth of his sympathies with poverty, but apparently
he had not thought out any scheme for righting the
economic wrongs we abound in. I cannot remember
our ever getting quite down to a discussion of the mat
ter; we came very near it once in the day of the vast
wave of emotion sent over the world by Looking Back-
384
MY MAKK TWAIN
ward, and again when we were all so troubled by the
great coal strike in Pennsylvania ; in considering that
he seemed to be for the time doubtful of the justice
of the working - man's cause. At all other times he
seemed to know that whatever wrongs the working-
man committed work was always in the right.
When Clemens returned to America with his fam
ily, after lecturing round the world, I again saw him
in New York, where I so often saw him while he was
shaping himself for that heroic enterprise. He would
come to me, and talk sorrowfully over his financial
ruin, and picture it to himself as the stuff of some
unhappy dream, which, after long prosperity, had cul
minated the wrong wray. It was very melancholy, very
touching, but the sorrow to which he had come home
from his long journey had not that forlorn bewilder
ment in it. He was looking wonderfully well, and
when I wanted the name of his elixir, he said it was
plasmon. He was apt, for a man who had put faith
so decidedly away from him, to take it back and pin
it to some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort.
Once, when he was well on in years, he came to Xew
York without glasses, and announced that he and all
his family, so astigmatic and myopic and old-sighted,
had, so to speak, burned their spectacles behind them
upon the instruction of some sage who had found out
that they were a delusion. The next time he came he
wore spectacles freely, almost ostentatiously, and I
heard from others that the whole Clemens family had
been near losing their eyesight by the miracle worked
in their behalf. !Nbw, I was not surprised to learn that
" the damned human race " was to be saved by plasmon,
if anything, and that my first duty was to visit the
plasmon agency with him, and procure enough plasmon
to secure my family against the ills it was heir to for
385
L1TEKAKY JfKIEXDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
evermore. I did not immediately understand that plas-
mon was one of the investments which he had made
from " the substance of things hoped for," and in the
destiny of a disastrous disappointment. But after pay
ing off the creditors of his late publishing firm, he had
to do something with his money, and it was not his
fault if he did not make a fortune out of plasmou.
XXI
FOE a time it was a question whether he should not
go back with his family to their old home in Hartford.
Perhaps the father's and mother's hearts drew them
there all the more strongly because of the grief written
ineffaceably over it, but for the younger ones it was no
longer the measure of the world. It was easier for all
to stay on indefinitely in Xew York, which is a so
journ without circumstance, and equally the home of
exile and of indecision. The Clemenses took a pleas
ant, spacious house at Riverdale, on the Hudson, and
there I began to see them again on something like the
sweet old terms. They lived far more unpretentiously
than they used, and I think with a notion of economy,
which they had never very successfully practised. I
recall that at the end of a certain year in Hartford,
when they had been saving and paying cash for every
thing, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed
experiment, and asking me to guess how many bills
they had at Xew Year's ; he hastened to say that a
horse-car would not have held them. At Riverdale
they kept no carriage, and there was a snowy night
when I drove up to their handsome old mansion in
the station carryall, which was crusted with mud as
from the going down of the Deluge after transporting
Xoah and his family from the Ark to whatever point
they decided to settle at provisionally. But the good
talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer
poverty of mind or soul, was there, and we jubilantly-
found ourselves again in our middle youth. It was
the mighty moment when Clemens was building his
engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science,
which superstition nobody, and he least of all, expect
ed to destroy. It would not be easy to say whether
in his talk of it his disgust for the illiterate twaddle
of Mrs. Eddy's book, or his admiration of her genius
for organization was the greater. He believed that as
a religious machine the Christian Science Church was
as perfect as the Roman Church and destined to be
more formidable in its control of the minds of men.
Ho looked for its spread over the whole of Christen
dom, and throughout the winter he spent at Riverdale
he was ready to meet all listeners more than half-way
with his convictions of its powerful grasp of the aver
age human desire to get something for nothing. The
vacuous vulgarity of its texts was a perpetual joy to
him, while he bowed with serious respect to the sagacity
which built so securely upon the everlasting rock of
human credulity and folly.
An interesting phase of his psychology in this busi
ness was not only his admiration for the masterly
policy of the Christian Science hierarchy, but his
willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be
tried on his friends and family, if they wished it. He
had a tender heart for the whole generation of em
pirics, as well as the newer sorts of scientitians, but
he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the
failure of the regulars rather than upon their own suc
cesses, which also he believed in. He was recurrently,
but not insistently, desirous that you should try their
strange magics when you were going to try the familiar
medicines.
XXII
THE order of my acquaintance, or call it intimacy,
with Clemens was this: our first meeting in Boston,
iny visits to him in Hartford, his visits to me in Cam
bridge, in Belmont, and in Boston, our briefer and less
frequent meetings in Paris and ISTew York, all with
repeated interruptions through my absences in Europe,
and his sojourns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and Flor
ence, and his flights to the many ends, and odds and
ends, of the earth. I will not try to follow the events,
if they were not rather the subjective experiences, of
those different periods and points of time which I must
not fail to make include his summer at York Harbor,
and his divers residences in K"ew York, on Tenth Street
and on Fifth Avenue, at Riverdale, and at Stormfield,
which his daughter has told me he loved best of all his
houses and hoped to make his home for long years.
Xot much remains to me of the week or so that we
had together in Paris early in the summer of 1904.
The first thing I got at my bankers was a cable message
announcing that my father was stricken with paralysis,
but urging my stay for further intelligence, and I went
about, till the final summons came, with my head in a
mist of care and dread. Clemens was very kind and
brotherly through it all. He was living greatly to his
mind in one of those arcaded little hotels in the Rue
de Rivoli, and he was free from all household duties
to range with me. We drove together to make calls
389
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
of digestion at many houses where he had got indiges
tion through his reluctance from their hospitality, for
he hated dining out. But, as he explained, his wife
wanted him to make these visits, and he did it, as he
did everything she wanted. At one place, some sub
urban villa, he could get no answer to his ring, and
he " hove " his cards over the gate just as it opened,
and he had the shame of explaining in his uriexplan-
atory French to the man picking them up. He was
excruciatingly helpless with his cabmen, but by very
cordially smiling and casting himself on the drivers'
mercy he always managed to get where he wanted.
The family was on the verge of their many moves,
and he was doing some small errands ; he said that the
others did the main things, and left him to do what the
cat might.
It was with that return upon the buoyant billow of
plasmon, renewed in look and limb, that Clemens's uni
versally pervasive popularity began in his own country.
He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or
more largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it
was my sense of this that inspired the stupidity of my
saying to him when we came to consider " the state of
polite learning " among us, " You mustn't expect peo
ple to keep it up here as they do in England." But
it appeared that his countrymen were only wanting the
chance, and they kept it up in honor of him past all
precedent. One does not go into a catalogue of dinners,
receptions, meetings, speeches, and the like, when there
are more vital things to speak of. He loved these ob
vious joys, and he eagerly strove with the occasions
they gave him for the brilliancy which seemed so ex-
laustless and was so exhausting. His friends saw that
lie was wearing himself out, and it was not because of
Mrs. Clemens's health alone that they were glad to have
390
MY MAEK TWAIN
him take refuge at Riverdale. The family lived there
two happy, hopeless years, and then it was ordered that
they should change for his wife's sake to some less
exacting climate. Clemens was not eager to go to Flor
ence, but his imagination was taken as it would have
been in the old-young days by the notion of packing
his furniture into flexible steel cages from his house
in Hartford and unpacking it from them untouched
at his villa in Fiesole. He got what pleasure any man
could out of that triumph of mind over matter, but the
shadow was creeping up his life. One sunny afternoon
we sat on the grass before the mansion, after his wife
had begun to get well enough for removal, and we
looked up toward a balcony where by-and-by that lovely
presence made itself visible, as if it had stooped there
from a cloud. A hand frailly waved a handkerchief;
Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling tenderly:
" What ? What ?" as if it might be an asking for him
instead of the greeting it really was for me. It was
the last time I saw her, if indeed I can be said to have
seen her then, and long afterward when I said how
beautiful we all thought her, how good, how wise, how
wonderfully perfect in every relation of life, he cried
out in a breaking voice: "Oh, why didn't you ever
tell her ? She thought you didn't like her." What a
pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we
have told her ? His unreason endeared him to me more
than all his wisdom.
To that Riverdale sojourn belong my impressions of
his most violent anti-Christian Science rages, which
began with the postponement of his book, and softened
into acceptance of the delay till he had well-nigh for
gotten his wrath when it come out. There was also
one of those joint episodes of ours, which, strangely
enough, did not eventuate in entire failure, as most of
391
LITEEAEY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
our joint episodes did. He wrote furiously to me of
a wrong which had been done to one of the most help
less and one of the most helped of our literary brethren,
asking me to join with him in recovering the money
paid over by that brother's publisher to a false friend
who had withheld it and would not give any account
of it. Our hapless brother had appealed to Clemens,
as he had to me, with the facts, but not asking our help,
probably because he knew he need not ask; and Clem
ens enclosed to me a very taking-by-the-throat message
which he proposed sending to the false friend. For
once I had some sense, and answered that this would
never do, for we had really no power in the matter, and
I contrived a letter to the recreant so softly diplo
matic that I shall always think of it with pride when
my honesties no longer give me satisfaction, saying
that this incident had come to our knowledge, and sug
gesting that we felt sure he would not finally wish to
withhold the money. jSTothiug more, practically, than
that, but that was enough; there came promptly back
a letter of justification, covering a very substantial
check, which we hilariously forwarded to our bene
ficiary. But the helpless man who was so used to be
ing helped did not answer with the gladness I, at least,
expected of him. He acknowledged the check as he
would any ordinary payment, and then he made us
observe that there was still a large sum due him out
of the moneys withheld. At this point I proposed to
Clemens that we should let the nonchalant victim col
lect the remnant himself. Clouds of sorrow had gath
ered about the bowed head of the delinquent since we
began on him, and my fickle sympathies were turning
his way from the victim who was really to blame for
leaving his affairs so unguardedly to him in the first
place. Clemens made some sort of grim assent, and we
392
MY MARK TWAIN
dropped the matter. He was more used to ingratitude
from those he helped than I was, who found being lain
down upon not so amusing as he found my revolt. He
reckoned I was right, he said, and after that I think
we never recurred to the incident. It was not ingrati
tude that he ever minded; it; was treachery that really
maddened him past forgiveness.
xxin
DURING the summer he spent at York Harbor I was
only forty minutes away at Kittery Point, and we saw
each other often; but this was before the last time at
Riverdale. He had a wide, low cottage in a pine grove
overlooking York River, and we used to sit at a corner
of the veranda farthest away from Mrs. Clemens's win
dow, where we could read our manuscripts to each
other, and tell our stories, and laugh our hearts out
without disturbing her. At first she had been about
the house, and there was one gentle afternoon when
she made tea for us in the parlor, but that was the last
time I spoke with her. After that it was really a ques
tion of how soonest and easiest she could be got back
to Riverdale ; but, of course, there were specious delays
in which she seemed no worse and seemed a little better,
and Clemens could work at a novel he had begun. He
had taken a room in the house of a friend and neigh
bor, a fisherman and boatman ; there was a table where
he could write, and a bed where he could lie down and
read ; and there, unless my memory has played me one
of those constructive tricks that people's memories in
dulge in, he read me the first chapters of an admirable
story. The scene was laid in a Missouri town, and
the characters such as he had known in boyhood; but
as often as I tried to make him own it, he denied hav
ing written any such story; it is possible that I dreamed
it, but I hope the MS. will yet be found. Upon re-
394
MY MARK TWAIN
flection I cannot believe that I dreamed it, and I cannot
believe that it was an effect of that sort of pseudo-
mnemonics which I have mentioned. The characters
in the novel are too clearly outlined in my recollection,
together with some critical reservations of my own con
cerning them. Kot only does he seem to have read me
those first chapters, but to have talked them over with
me and outlined the whole story.
I cannot say whether or not he believed that his wife
would recover; he fought the fear of her death to the
end; for her life was far more largely his than the
lives of most men's wives arc theirs. For his own life
I believe he would never have much cared, if I may
trust a saying of one who was so absolutely without
pose as he was. He said that he never saw a dead man
whom he did not envy for having had it over and being-
done with it. Life had always amused him, and in the
resurgence of its interests after his sorrow had ebbed
away he was again deeply interested in the world and
in the human race, which, though damned, abounded
in subjects of curious inquiry. When the time came
for his wife's removal from York Harbor I went with
him to Boston, Avhere he wished to look up the best
means of her conveyance to Xew York. The inquiry
absorbed him : the sort of invalid - car he could get ;
how she could be carried to the village station; how
the car could be detached from the eastern train at
Boston and carried round to the southern train on the
other side of the city, and then how it could be attached
to the Hudson River train at ISTew York and left at
Riverdale. There was no particular of the business
which he did not scrutinize and master, not only with
his poignant concern for her welfare, but with his
strong curiosity as to how these unusual things were
done with the usual means. With the inertness that
395
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
grows upon an aging man he had been used to dele
gating more and more things, but of that thing I per
ceived that he would not delegate the least detail.
He had meant never to go abroad again, but when
it came time to go he did not look forward to return
ing; he expected to live in Florence always after that;
they were used to the life and they had been happy
there some years earlier before he went with his wife
for the cure of ISTauheim. But when he came home
again it was for good and all. It was natural that he
should wish to live in New York, where they had al
ready had a pleasant year in Tenth Street. I used to
see him there in an upper room, looking south over a
quiet open space of back yards where wye fought our
battles in behalf of the Filipinos and the Boers, and he
carried on his campaign against the missionaries in
China. He had not yet formed his habit of lying for
whole days in bed and reading and writing there, yet
he was a good deal in bed, from weakness, I suppose,
and for the mere comfort of it.
My perspectives are not very clear, and in the fore
shortening of events which always takes place in our
review of the past I may not always time things aright.
But I believe it was not until he had taken his house
at 21 Fifth Avenue that he began to talk to me of
writing his autobiography. He meant that it should
be a perfectly veracious record of his life and period;
for the first time in literature there should be a true
history of a man and a true presentation of the men
the man had known. As we talked it over the scheme
enlarged itself in oiTr riotous fancy. We said it should
be not only a book, it should be a library, not only a
library, but a literature. It should make good the
world's loss through Omar's barbarity at Alexandria;
there was no image so grotesque, so extravagant that
396
MY MARK TWAIN
we did not play with it; and the work so far as he
carried it was really done on a colossal scale. But one
day he said that as to veracity it was a failure ; he had
begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told the truth
about himself it was because no man ever could. How
far he had carried his autobiography I cannot say; he
dictated the matter several hours each day; and the
public has already seen long passages from it, and can
judge, probably, of the make and matter of the whole
from these. It is immensely inclusive, and it observes
no order or sequence. Whether now, after his death, it
will be published soon or late I have no means of know
ing. Once or twice he said in a vague way that it was
not to be published for twenty years, so that the dis
comfort of publicity might be minimized for all the
survivors. Suddenly he told me he was not working at
it; but I did not understand whether he had finished
it or merely dropped it ; I never asked.
We lived in the same city, but for old men rather
far apart, he at Tenth Street and I at Seventieth, and
with our colds and other disabilities we did not see
each other often. He expected me to come to him, and
I would not without some return of my visits, but we
never ceased to be friends, and good friends, so far as
I know. I joked him once as to how I was going to
come out in his autobiography, and he gave me some
sort of joking reassurance. There was one incident,
however, that brought us very frequently and actively
together. He came one Sunday afternoon to have me
call with him on Maxim Gorky, who was staying at
a hotel a few streets above mine. We were both inter
ested in Gorky, Clemens rather more as a revolutionist
and I as a realist, though I too wished the Russian
Tsar ill, and the novelist well in his mission to the
Russian sympathizers in this republic. But I had lived
397
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
through the episode of Kossuth's visit to us and his
vain endeavor to raise funds for the Hungarian cause
in 1851, when we were a younger and nobler nation
than now, with hearts if not hands opener to the " op
pressed of Europe " ; the oppressed of America, the
four or five millions of slaves, we did not count. I
did not believe that Gorky could get the money for the
cause of freedom in Russia which he had come to get ;
as I told a valued friend of his and mine, I did not
believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars, and
I think now I set the figure too high. I had already
refused to sign the sort of general appeal his friends
were making to our principles and pockets because I
felt it so wholly idle, and when the paper was produced
in Gorky's presence and Clemens put his name to it
I still refused. The next day Gorky was expelled from
his hotel with the woman who was not his wife, but
who, I am bound to say, did not look as if she were
not, at least to me, who am, however, not versed in
those aspects of human nature.
I might have escaped unnoted, but Clemens's fa
miliar head gave us away to the reporters waiting at
the elevator's mouth for all who went to see Gorky.
As it was, a hunt of interviewers ensued for us sev
erally and jointly. I could remain aloof in my hotel
apartment, returning answer to such guardians of the
public right to know everything that I had nothing to
say of Gorky's domestic affairs; for the public in
terest had now strayed far from the revolution, and
centred entirely upon these. But with Clemens it was
different; he lived in a house with a street door kept
by a single butler, and he was constantly rung for. I
forget how long the siege lasted, but long enough for
us to have fun with it. That was the moment of the
great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves in
398
MY AIAKK TWAIN
easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then
" blowing a cone off," as the telegraphic phrase was.
The roof of the great market in Naples had just broken
in under its load of ashes and cinders, and crushed
hundreds of people ; and we asked each other if we were
not sorry we had not been there, where the pressure
would have been far less terrific than it was with us
in Fifth Avenue. The forbidden butler came up with
a message that there were some gentlemen below who
wanted to see Clemens.
" How many ?" he demanded.
" Five," the butler faltered.
" Reporters 2"
The butler feigned uncertainty.
" What would you do ?" he asked me.
" I wouldn't see them," I said, and then Clemens
went directly down to them. How or by what means
he appeased their voracity I cannot say, but I fancy
it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was
harmless enough. They went away joyfully, and he
came back in radiant satisfaction with having seen
them. Of course he was right and I wrong, and he
was right as to the point at issue between Gorky and
those who had helplessly treated him with such cruel
ignominy. In America it is not the convention for
men to live openly in hotels with women who are not
their wives. Gorky had violated this convention and
he had to pay the penalty ; and concerning the destruc
tion of his efficiency as an emissary of the revolution,
his blunder was worse than a crime.
XXIV
To the period of Cleniens's residence in Fifth Ave
nue belongs his efflorescence in white serge. He was
always rather aggressively indifferent about dress, and
at a very early date in our acquaintance Aldrich and
I attempted his reform, by clubbing to buy him a cravat.
But he would not put away his stiff little black bow,
and until he imagined the suit of white serge, he wore
always a suit of black serge, truly deplorable in the cut
of the sagging frock. After his measure had once been
taken he refused to make his clothes the occasion of
personal interviews with his tailor; he sent the stuff
by the kind elderly woman who had been in the service
of the family from the earliest days of his marriage,
and accepted the result without criticism. But the
white serge was an inspiration which few men would
have had the courage to act upon. The first time I
saw him wear it was at the authors' hearing before the
Congressional Committee on Copyright in Washington.
Nothing could have been more dramatic than the gest
ure with which he flung off his long loose overcoat, and
stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his
silvery head. It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly
loved a coup; but the magnificent speech which he
made, tearing to shreds the venerable farrago of non
sense about non-property in ideas which had formed
the basis of all copyright legislation, made you forget
even his spectacularity.
400
MY MARK TWAIN
It is well known how proud lie was of his Oxford
gown, not merely because it symbolized the honor in
which he was held by the highest literary body in the
world, but because it was so rich and so beautiful. The
red and the lavender of the cloth flattered his eyes as
the silken black of the same degree of Doctor of Letters,
given him years before at Yale, could not do. His
frank, defiant happiness in it, mixed with a due sense
of burlesque, was something that those lacking his poet-
soul could never imagine ; they accounted it vain, weak ;
but that would not have mattered to him if he had
known it. In his London sojourn he had formed the
top-hat habit, and for a while he lounged splendidly
up and down Fifth Avenue in that society emblem;
but he seemed to tire of it, and to return kindly to
the soft hat of his Southwestern tradition.
He disliked clubs ; I don't know whether he belonged
to any in New York, but I never met him in one. As
I have told, he himself had formed the Human Race
Club, but as he never could get it together it hardly
counted. There was to have been a meeting of it the
time of my only visit to Stormfield in April of last
year ; but of three who were to have come I alone came.
We got on very well without the absentees, after find
ing them in the wrrong, as usual, and the visit was like
those I used to have with him so many years before in
Hartford, but there was not the old ferment of subjects.
Many things had been discussed and put away for
good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for
each other, who wrere so differently parts of it. He
showed his absolute content with his house, and that
was the greater pleasure for me because it was my
son who designed it. The architect had been so fort
unate as to be able to plan it where a natural avenue
of savins, the close-knit, slender, cvpress-like cedars of
401
L1TEEAKY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
New England, led away from tbe rear of the villa to
the little level of a pergola, meant some day to be
wreathed and roofed with vines. But in the early
spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful
nakedness of the northern winter. It opened in the
surpassing loveliness of wooded and meadowed uplands,
under skies that were the first days blue, and the last
gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. We walked
up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace
and the pergola, and talked with the melancholy amuse
ment, the sad tolerance of age for the sort of men and
things that used to excite us or enrage us ; now we were
far past turbulence or anger. Once we took a walk
together across the yellow pastures to a chasmal creek
on his grounds, where the ice still knit the clayey
banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far
down clashed through and over the stones and the
shards of ice. Clemens pointed out the scenery he
had bought to give himself elbow-room, and showed
me the lot he was going to have me build on. The
next day we came again with the geologist he had
asked up to Stormfield to analyze its rocks. Truly
he loved the place, though he had been so weary of
change and so indifferent to it that he never saw it
till he came to live in it. He left it all to the archi
tect whom he had known from a child in the intimacy
which bound our families together, though we bodily
lived far enough apart. I loved his little ones and he
was sweet to mine and was their delighted-in and won-
dered-at friend. Once and once again, and yet again
and again, the black shadow that shall never be lifted
where it falls, fell in his house and in mine, during
the forty years and more that we were friends, and en
deared us the more to each other.
XXV
MY visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender
relucting on his part and on mine. Every morning
before I dressed I heard him sounding my name
through the house for the fun of it and I know for
the fondness; and if I looked out of my door, there
he was in his long nightgown swaying up and down
the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a
boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of
frolic with some one. The last morning a soft sugar-
snow had fallen and was falling, and I drove through
it down to the station in the carriage which had been
given him by his wife's father when they were first
married, and been kept all those intervening years in
honorable retirement for this final use. Its springs
had not grown yielding with time; it had rather the
stiffness and severity of age ; but for him it must have
swung low like the sweet chariot of the negro " spirit
ual " which I heard him sing with such fervor, when
those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make
their way northward. Go Down, Daniel, was one in
which I can hear his quavering tenor now. He was a
lover of the things he liked, and full of a passion for
them which satisfied itself in reading them matchlessly
aloud. !No one could read Uncle Remus like him ; his
voice echoed the voices of the negro nurses who told
his childhood the wonderful tales. I remember es
pecially his rapture with Mr. Cable's Old Creole Days,
27 403
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
and the thrilling force with which he gave the forbid
ding of the leper's brother when the city's survey ran
the course of an avenue through the cottage where the
leper lived in hiding: " Strit must not pass!"
Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any I have
known, the material given him by the Mystery that
makes a man and then leaves him to make himself
over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a
foundation of clear and solid truth. At the last day
he will not have to confess anything, for all his life
was the free knowledge of any one who would ask him
of it. The Searcher of hearts will not bring him to
shame at that day, for he did not try to hide any of
the things for which he was often so bitterly sorry.
He knew where the Eesponsibility lay, and he took a
man's share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly
he left the rest of the answer to the God who had im
agined men.
It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the
intensity with which he pierced to the heart of life,
and the breadth of vision with which he compassed the
whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and
then left trying. We had other meetings, insignifi
cantly sad and brief ; but the last time I saw him alive
was made memorable to me by the kind, clear judicial
sense with which he explained and justified the labor-
unions as the sole present help of the weak against the
strong.
Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those
flowers with which we garland our despair in that piti
less hour. After the voice of his old friend Twichell
had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through
in broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at
the ^ face I knew so well; and it was patient with the
patience I had so often seen in it : something of puzzle,
404
MY MARK TWAIN
a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from
the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke
in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of
him. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes — I knew
them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers,
critics, humorists; they were like one another and like
other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incompar
able, the Lincoln of our literature.
INDEX
AOASSTZ, JEAN Loria Anot.PtiK,
102, 181, 184, 186, 201, 219,
209-272, 291.
Akers, Elizabeth, 22.5.
Alareon, Pedro Antonio do, 24.').
Alcantara, Dotn Pedro de, anec
dote of, 204.
Alcott, Amos Bronson, 54.
Aldrioh, Thomas Bailey, 70, 92,
114, 120, 121, 122, 179, 277,
278, 310 312, 354, 357, 1.50.
Appleton, Thomas, 152, 184, 185,
180, 188, 190, 201.
Arnold, Matthew, 332.
Arthur, Cheater Alan, 375.
Austen, Jane, 319.
BARUFTT, LAWRKNVK, 203, 204.
Beeoher, Henry Ward, 99.
Bellamy, Kdward, 347.
Bjornaon. Bjdrnntiernc, 208, 203.
Booth, Fxlwin, 107.
Bowles, Samuel, 113, 120.
Bovesen, Iljalrnar lljorth, 250-
200, 2*0.
Brare. Charles Loring, 335.
Brooks, Noah, 310.
Browne, Charles Farrar, 80, 127,
128.
Ilrownell, Henry Howard, 93.
Browning, Robert, 3, 108, 211,
320.
Bryant, William Cullen, 70, 114.
Butter, William Allen, 77.
CAULK, GKOUUK WASIUXOTON,
115, 357, 403.
Carlyle, Thotnaw, 32, 42.
Cary, Aliee. 114.
Catherwood, Mary Hart well, 115
Cervantes, Miguel de, 244, 317.
Chanler, Ameue Hives. 115.
Channing, William Kllery, 63,
147.
Child, Franc!* .1., 181, 2,52-2.50,
:«0, 3(W.
Clemens. Mrs. Samuel l-anghorne.
309, 314-317, 323, :WO, 390,
391, 395.
Clemens. Samuel I.anghorne, 114,
307 405.
Conway, Moneure I)., 99, 114.
Cookc, Roae Terry, ill, 133.
Cranrh, Christopher Pearse, 107,
285.
Curtis, Oorge William, 10, 12,
70, 108 111, 195.
DAXA, CnAUi,r.8 A, 1 17.
Dana, Hiohanl Henry, Jr., 181,
273- 275.
Darwin, Charles Hobert, 3.55.
I)o Forest, John William, 117.
De Quiney, Thomas, 3, 302.
Derby, (}<H)rg<» II., 370.
Dirkens, Charles, 42, 290.
Diokenson, Anna, 301.
Fi>i>v, MAHV BAKK!» (1., :IS8.
F.liot , (M»org«>, 2.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3, 10,
55, 00 05, 92, 111. 110, 117,
132, 133, 134, 137, 138, 147,
102, 171, 2<X), 210, 295, 323,
311, 303 305, 405.
FIKUM*. JAMF.H THOMAS, 33 35,
30 12, 05, 00, 70, 85, 8tf, 111,
112, 131, 140, 1.V2, 101, 184,
291, 307, 308, 310.
407
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Fiske, John, 181, 272, 287.
Florence, William James, 379.
Fuller, H. B., 115.
GALLENGA, ANTONIO CARLO NA-
POLEONE, 259.
Garfield, James A., 209.
Garland, Hamlin, 115.
Giles, Henry, 70.
Goldsmith, Oliver, 302, 319.
Gorky, Maxim, 397-399.
Graham, James Lorrimer, 107.
Grant, Ulysses Simpson, 375-
377.
Gray, Asa, 181.
Greene, George Washington, 192,
193, 205.
HALA, CHAKLES, 91, 92.
Hale, Edward Everett, 11, 91,
114, 116, 118.
Harris, Joel Chandler, 115.
Harte, Francis Bret, 11 4, 118 1,231,
272, 290-305, 310, 311, 351.
Hawthorne, Julian, 51.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 2, 10, 17,
38, 50-57, 60, 64, 71, 116, 118,
162, 200, 211.
Hay, John, 81, 114, 320.
Hayes, Rutherford B., 9, 237,
238.
Heine, Heinrich, 3, 16, 26, 216,
296, 373.
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth,
114, 116, 147, 287.
Hildreth, Richard, 97-99.
Hillard, George S., 130, 131.
Hillebrand, Carl, 259.
Holmes, John, 280-283.
Holmes, Oliver W'endell, 10, 36-
40, 44-47, 52, 56, 76, 88, 91,
92, 114, 116, 117, 118, 120,
132, 134, 137, 140, 146-177,
184, 185, 192, 195, 279, 363-
366, 368, 405.
Houghton, H. O., 324, 362.
Houghton & Mifflin, 362.
Howe, Julia Ward, 114, 116, 131,
132.
Howell, James, 26, 27.
Hubbard, Bartley, 105.
Hugo, Victor, 69.
Hurd, M. M., 102.
IBSEN, HENRIK, 245, 263.
Ingersoll, Robert Green, 335.
JAMES, HENRY, Jr., 181.
James, Henry, ST., 151, 181, 266-
269, 272.
James, William, 287.
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 118.
Judd, Sylvester, 117.
KEELER, RALPH, 275-279, 297,
310, 311.
Kielland, Alexander Lange, 263.
King, Grace, 115.
LAMB, CHARLES, 304.
Larcom, Lucy, 122, 123.
Lathrop, George Parsons, 354.
Lewes, George Henry, 85.
Lie, Jonas Lauritz Edemil, 263.
Lincoln, Abraham, 46, 81, 82,
107, 220, 405.
Lloyd, Demarest, 329.
Longfellow, Henry W7adsworth,
3, 10, 15, 31, 91, 93, 103, 114,
116, 117, 132, 147, 152, 161,
162, 173, 181-211, 227, 232,
271, 295, 350, 362, 363-365,
405.
Lorraine, Claude, 341.
Lowell, James Russell, 2, 10, 22-
29, 32, 35-40, 46, 47, 52, 76,
88, 89, 91, 100, 103, 104, 108,
112, 114, 116, 117, 120, 122,
129, 147, 159, 162, 171, 173,
181, 182, 184, 195, 196, 197,
212-250, 280, 281, 283, 294-
296, 338, 350, 405.
Lowell, Mrs. James Russell, 240,
242, 243.
Ludlow, Fitzhugh, 70.
MAARTENS, MAARTEN, 259.
Messadaglia, Professor, 198.
Michelet, Jules, 3.
Morris, William, 320.
Motley, John Lothrop, 93-97,
147.
Murfree, Mary Noailles, 115.
NICOLAY, JOHN, 81.
408
INDEX
Norton, Charles Eliot, 100, 122,
147, 181, 182, 184, 187, 194,
216, 227, 288, 350, 355.
O'BRIEN, FITZ JAMES, 70, 88.
O'Connor, William D., 82, 83.
Osgood, James R., 112, 121, 122,
157, 329, 354.
PAGE, THOMAS NELSON, 115.
Palfrey, John Graham, 181, 283-
286.
Parkman, Francis, 140-142, 147.
Parsons, Thomas Williams, 181.
Parton, James, 142, 143.
Peabody, Andrew Preston, 181.
Pepys, Samuel, 376.
Phillips, Wendell, 30.
Phrenix, John, see Derby, George
H.
Piatt, John James, 1, 33, 82, 93.
Piatt, Mrs. John James, 93.
Pierce, James, 181.
Poe, Edgar Allan, 63, 64, 200.
Potter, Edward, 311.
Prescott, Harriet, see Harriet
Prescott Spofford.
Prescott, William H., 147.
QUINCY, EDMUND, 129, 131.
RAYMOND, JOHN T., 326, 328-
330.
Reade, Charles, 3, 42.
Riley, James Whitcomb, 115.
Ropes, John Codman, 144, 145.
Ruffini, Giovanni Domenico, 259.
SALVINI, ALESSANDRO, 360.
Salvini, Tommaso, 205.
Schurz, Carl, 259.
Scott, Walter, 359.
Scudder, Horace E., 287.
Skinner, Henrietta Dana, 275.
Sophocles, Evangelinus Aposto-
lides, 181, 183.
Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 11,
114, 116, 125, 126.
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 70,
83, 84, 86, 92, 106, 114.
Steele, Richard, 302.
Sterne, Laurence, 302.
Stoddard, Charles Warren, 115.
Stoddard, Elizabeth Barstow,
86-88, 106, 114.
Stoddard, Richard Henry, 86-
88, 92, 106, 114.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 11, 114,
116, 118, 138, 139, 140, 161,
341, 362.
Sumner, Charles, 139, 200, 201.
Swift, Jonathan, 317.
TAYLOR, BAYARD, 3-5, 7-9, 10,
107, 111, 114.
Tennyson, Alfred, 3, 32, 42, 211.
Thackeray, William Makepeace,
2, 3.
Thanet, Octave, 115.
Thaxter, Celia, 124.
Thomas, Edith, 115.
Thompson, Maurice, 115, 201.
Thoreau, Henry David, 11, 53,
54, 57-60.
Ticknor, George, 130, 131.
Ticknor & Fields, 13, 33, 40, 112,
119, 307.
Tolstoy, Count Leo, 320.
Trowbridge, John Townsend, 122,
123.
Turguenieff, Ivan Sergyevich,
286.
Twain, Mark, see Clemens, Sam
uel Langhorne.
Twichell, Joseph H., 314, 335,
349, 404.
VALDES, JUAN, 245.
Valentine, Edmund Francois, 3.
Vanderbilt, William Henry, 379.
WARD, ARTEMUS, see Browne,
Charles Farrar.
Ward, Mrs. Phelps, 114, 116.
Waring, George Edwin, 354.
Warner, Charles Dudley, 311,
313, 326, 365, 373.
Washington, George, anecdote
of, 190.
Whipple, Edwin P., 114, 126,
127.
409
LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE
Whitman, Walt, 73-76, 83, 134.
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 11, 32,
92, 114, 116, 117, 134-136,
138, 171, 200, 207, 362.
Wilkins, Mary E., 118.
Willson, Forceyethe, 92, 279,
280.
Winthrop, Theodore, 92.
Woolson, Constance F., 115.
Wyman, Jeffries, 271.
THE END
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