Part 6 (2/2)

When, in 1851, I arrived as a freshman in Cambridge, I encountered on my first visit to the post-office a figure standing on the steps, which at once drew my attention. It was that of a man in his best years, handsome, genial of countenance, and well-groomed. A silk hat surmounted his well-barbered head and visage, a dark frock-coat was b.u.t.toned about his form, his shoes were carefully polished and he twirled a little cane. To my surprise he bowed to me courteously as I glanced up. I was very humble, young westerner that I was in the scholastic town, and puzzled by the friendly nod. The man was no other than Longfellow, and in his politeness to me he was only following his invariable custom of greeting in a friendly way every student he met. His niceness of attire rather amused the boys of those days who, however, responded warmly to his friendliness and loved him much.

This story was current. He had for some time been a famous man and was subjected to much persecution from sight-seers which he bore good-naturedly. Standing one day at the Craigie House gate he was accosted by a lank backwoodsman: ”Say, stranger, I have come from way back; kin you tell me how I kin git to see the great North American poet?” Longfellow, entering into the humour of the situation, gave to the stranger his ready bow and responded: ”Why, I am the great North American poet,” at the same time inviting him into the garden with its pleasant outlook across the Charles toward the Brookline Hills.

It would be quite unjust to think that there was any conceit in his remark, it was all a joke, but the thoughtless boys of those days took it up, commemorating it in a song, a parody of the air _Trancadillo_.

”Professor Longfellow is an excellent man, He scratches off verses as fast as he can, With a hat on one whisker and an air that says go it,-- He says I'm _the_ great North American poet.

Hey, fellow, bright fellow, Professor Longfellow, He's the man that wrote Evangeline, Professor Longfellow.”

This was my first introduction to college music and I often bore a quavering tenor as we shouted it out in our freshman enthusiasm. The ridicule, however, was only on the surface; we thoroughly liked and respected the genial poet and it was a great sorrow to us that he resigned during our course, although his successor was no other than James Russell Lowell, whose star was then rising rapidly with the _Biglow Papers_. It was our misfortune that the succession was not close. We had two professors of modern literature, both famous men, but the usual calamity befell us which attaches to those who have two stools to sit upon. We fell to the ground. We had a little of Longfellow and a little of Lowell, the gap in the succession unfortunately opening for us. I did, however, hear Longfellow lecture and it is a delightful memory. His voice was rich and resonant, bespeaking refinement, and it was particularly in reading poetry that it told. I recall a discussion of German lyrics, the criticism interspersed with many readings from the poets noted, which was deeply impressive. At one time he quoted the ”Shepherd's Song” from _Faust_, ”Der Schafer putzte sich zum Tanz.” This he gave with exquisite modulation, dwelling upon the refrain at the end of each stanza, ”Juchhe, Juchhe, Juchheise, heise, he, so ging der Fiedelbogen!” This he recited with such effect that one imagined he heard the touch of the bow upon the strings of the 'cello with the mellow, long-drawn cadence. He read to us, too, with great feeling, the simple lyric, _Die wandelnde Glocke_; upon me at least this made so deep an impression that soon after having the cla.s.s poem to write, I based upon it my composition, devoting to it far too a.s.siduously the best part of my last college term. I have always felt that I was near the incubation of Longfellow's best-known poem, perhaps his masterpiece, the all-pervading _Hiawatha_. The college chapel of those days was in University Hall and is now the Faculty Room, a beautiful little chamber which sufficed sixty years ago for the small company which then composed the student body.

At either end above the floor-s.p.a.ce was a gallery. One fronted the pulpit, curving widely and arranged with pews for the accommodation of the professors and their families. Opposite this was the choir loft over the preacher's head, a smaller gallery containing the strident old-fas.h.i.+oned reed organ, and seats for the dozen or so who made up the college choir. Places in the choir were much sought after, for a student could stretch his legs and indulge in a comfortable yawn unmolested by the scrutiny of the proctors who kept a sharp watch on their brethren on the settees below. The professors brought their families, and the daughters were sometimes pretty. Behind the green curtains of the choir loft one could scan to his heart's content quite un.o.bserved the beauties at their devotions. The college choir of my time contained sometimes boys who had interesting careers. The organist who, while he manipulated the keys, growled at the same time an abysmal ba.s.s, afterward became a zealous Catholic, dying in Rome as Chamberlain in the Vatican of Pope Leo XIII. Horace Howard Furness was the princ.i.p.al stay of the treble, his clear, strong voice carrying far; my function was to afford to him a rather uncertain support. My voice was not of the best nor was my ear quite sure. I ventured once to criticise a fellow-singer as being off the _pitch_; he retorted that I was _tarred_ from the same stick and he proved it true, but there we sang together above the heads of venerable men who preached. They were good men, sometimes great scholars, but the ears they addressed were not always willing. A somewhat machine-like sermoniser who, it was irreverently declared, ran as if wound up but sometimes slipped a cog, had been known to pray ”that the intemperate might become temperate, the intolerant tolerant, the industrious dustrious.” Longfellow always came with his beautiful wife, the heroine of _Hyperion_, whose tragic fate a few years later shocked the world. He used to sit withdrawn into the corner of his high-backed pew, separated from us in the choir loft by only a short intervening s.p.a.ce, motionless, absorbed in some far-away thought.

Though his eyes were sometimes closed I knew that he was not asleep; what could be the topic on which his meditation was so intent? Not long after _Hiawatha_ appeared, and I shall always believe that in those Sunday musings in the quiet little chapel while the service droned on he was far away.

”In the land of the Dakotas, By the stream of Laughing Water.”

Some years after came the affliction which. cast a deep shadow upon his happy successful life. His wife one evening in light summer dress was writing a letter, and, lighting a candle to seal it, dropped the match among her draperies. The flame spread at once and she expired in agony; Longfellow was himself badly burned in his effort to extinguish the flames and always carried the scars. I did not see him in those years but have heard that his mood changed, he was no longer careful and debonair but often melancholy and dishevelled. Yet the sweetness of his spirit persisted to the end. The critics of late have been busy with Longfellow. His gift was inferior, they say, and his sentiment shallow. Let them carp as they will, he holds, as few poets have done, the hearts of men and women; still more he holds the hearts of children, and the life of mult.i.tudes continues to be softened and beautified by the gentle power of what he has written. Two or three years since it was my good fortune to be present at the celebration in Sanders Theatre of the centenary of Longfellow's birth. There was fine encomium from distinguished men, but to me the charming part of the occasion was the tribute of the school children who thronged upon the stage and sang with fresh, pure voices, the _Village Blacksmith_, the simple lines set to as simple music, ”Under the spreading chestnut-tree, the village smithy stands.” In my time the old tree still cast its shade over the highway which had scarcely yet ceased to be a village street. The smithy, too, was at hand and the clink of hammer upon anvil often audible; the blacksmith, I suppose had gone to his account. During the children's performance a voice noticeably clear and fine sounded in the high upper gallery, a happy suggestion of the voice of the mother singing in paradise as the daughter sang below. Honour to the poet who, while so many singers of our time vex us with entanglements metaphysical and exasperating, had thought always for the simplest hearts and attuned his lyre for them!

When I was in the Divinity School we organised a boat club, a proceeding looked upon askance by sedate doctors of divinity and church-goers who thought the young men would do better to stick to their Hebrew, but T.W. Higginson exclaimed that now he had some hope for the school. It did take time. It was a long walk from Divinity Hall to the river nor was the exercise brief, I have found rarely more rapturous pleasure than in the strenuous pulls I had on the Charles, and I witnessed the development of much st.u.r.dy manliness among those who, forsaking for a time their hermeneutics and homilies, gave themselves to the outdoor sport. Our club included a number of law-students and a young instructor or two; among the latter Charles W. Eliot, then with his foot on the first round of the ladder which he has climbed so high. Eliot pulled a capital stroke; my place was at the bow oar where a rather light weight was required who at the same time had head and strength enough to steer the boat among the perplexing currents. Our excursions were sometimes long. Once we went down the Back Bay, thence around Charlestown up the Mystic to Medford, during which trip I steered the _Orion_ without a single rub, going and coming under I think some forty draw-bridges. I have scarcely ever received a compliment in which I took more pride than when Eliot at the end, as we stood sweating and happy at the boathouse, told me that I had proved myself a good pilot. One evening, I remember, the sun had gone down and the surface of Back Bay perfectly placid at full tide glowed with rich tints; the boats were shooting numerously over the surface, cutting it sharply, the cut presently closing behind in a faint cicatrice that extended far. I thought of the beautiful simile in the _Autocrat of the Breakfast Table_, just then appearing in the _Atlantic_. Holmes had seen such things too, and said that they were like the wounds of the angels during the wars in heaven as described in _Paradise Lost_, gashes deep in the celestial bodies but closing instantly. In those years Dr.

Holmes was himself an enthusiastic oarsman and that night whom should we encounter alone in his little skiff but the Autocrat himself, out for his pleasure; he was plainly recognisable, though in most informal athletic dress, and as we sped past him a few rods away, Eliot from the stroke shouted a greeting over the water. ”Why, Charlie,” came ringing back the Autocrat's voice, ”I did not know you were old enough to be out in a boat!” Charlie was old enough, in fact our best oar, and took pleasure in demonstrating his maturity to the family friend who had seen him grow up.

Dr. Holmes was one of the most versatile of men. We saw him here at home with the oar in the open. He was an excellent professor of anatomy, renowned for his insight and readiness in adapting means to ends in the difficult science where his main work lay. Literature was merely his hobby, and he was wit, critic, philosopher, historian, poet, good in all. Many a brilliant man has come to wreck through being too versatile. ”_Ne sutor ultra crepidam_” is undoubtedly a good motto for the ordinary man, but sticking to his last was something to which Dr. Holmes could never bring himself, and in a marvellous way his abounding genius proved masterful in a score of varying fields. But I have no purpose here to discuss or account for Dr. Holmes. He was a delightful phenomenon in the life of the nineteenth century, with whom I chanced to be somewhat in touch, and it is for me only to note a bit of the scintillation which I saw brilliantly diffused. He was frequently under my gaze, a low-statured, nimble figure, a vivacious, always cheerful face with a p.r.o.nounced chin, seemingly ever on the brink of some outburst of merriment. I have heard him described as an ”incarnate pun,” but that hardly did him justice; punster he was, but he had a wit of a far higher kind and moods of grave dignity. His literary fame in those years was only incipient, his better work was just then beginning. The world appreciated him as a humourist of the lighter kind and capable, too, of spirited verse like _Old Ironsides_; it was not understood that he possessed profounder powers and could stir men to the depths.

I have a vivid image of him at a banquet of the Harvard Alumni a.s.sociation of which he was Second Vice-President, clothed in white summer garb, standing in a chair that his little figure might be in evidence in the crowd, merrily rattling off a string of amusing verses.

”I thank you, Mr. President, You kindly broke the ice, Virtue should always go before, I'm only _second vice_.”

These were the opening lines and the audience responded with roars to the inimitable fun-maker. In later years we learned to accord him a higher appreciation. The _Autocrat_ and the _Professor at the Breakfast Table_ have deep and acute thought as well as wit, and what one of our poets has produced a grander or more solemn lyric than the _Chambered Nautilus_? I dwell with emotion upon the funeral of Lowell, in itself a touching occasion, because it so happened that I saw on that day three great men for the last time, Justin Winsor, Phillips Brooks, and Dr. Holmes. I stood on the stairs at the rear of Appleton Chapel as the audience came down the aisle at the close. The coffin of Lowell rested for a moment on the gra.s.s under its wreaths, President Eliot and Holmes walked side by side; I have a distinct image of the countenance of Holmes as they came slowly out. It was no longer a young face but it had all the old vivacity and even at the moment was cheerful rather than serious; it had not, however, the cheerfulness of a man who looks lightly on life, but that of one whose philosophy enables him to conquer sorrow and look beyond, the face of a man who might write a triumphant hymn even in an atmosphere of death. These lines ran in my thought:

”Build thee more stately mansions, oh my soul, As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low vaulted past, Let each new temple, n.o.bler than the last Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine out-grown sh.e.l.l By life's unresting sea!”

The fame of James Russell Lowell, too, in these years was incipient.

As a writer he had shown himself to be elegantly schooled, but in the _Fable for Critics_ and the _Biglow Papers_, he had burst forth as a most effective and slas.h.i.+ng satirist. His culture was closely and perfectly fitted, but when scratched, revealing in full proportions the ”Whang-doodle” Yankee. The whang, however, handling with all the deftness in the world the broadest and subtlest themes, and the doodle standing for a patriotism of the n.o.blest. Those who came into close connection with him say that he grew morbidly fastidious, shrinking from coa.r.s.e contacts and was happy at last only in a delicate environment. When in health, nevertheless, he was a Yankee of the truest, though sublimated by his genius and superb accomplishments. I know a little inn far away among the hills on whose porch half concealed by the honeysuckle, Lowell is said often to have sat listening to the dialect of the farmers who ”vanned” and ”vummed”

as they disputed together in the evenings after the ch.o.r.es were done.

Lowell had the dialect in his very bones, and loved it, but took pains to confirm his knowledge of it by studying on the sod.

”An' yit I love the unhighschooled ways Ol' farmers hed when I was younger-- Their talk wuz meatier and would stay, While book-froth seems to whet your hunger.

For puttin' in a downright lick 'twixt humbug's eyes, there's few can metch it.

An' then it helves my thoughts as slick, ez stret grained hickory does a hetchet.”

On one occasion I heard Lowell tell a story in which he surrendered himself fully to the rustic heredity that was in him, flinging aside the accretions of culture. ”It is strange,” he said, ”how even the moral sense of men may become warped. In a certain Cape Cod village, for instance, it had long been the custom to profit from the wrecks that happened upon the dangerous sh.o.r.e, until at last the setting of false lights and the appropriation of the lost cargoes became a legitimate business. One Sunday a congregation at church (they were rigid Puritans and punctilious about wors.h.i.+p) was startled by the news that a West India s.h.i.+p loaded with sugar was going to pieces on the rocks near by. The birds of prey flocked to make prize of the booty.

A good deacon bagged a large quant.i.ty of sugar, piling it on the sh.o.r.e while he went for his oxen to carry it home. The bad boys, however, resolved to play a trick on the deacon; they emptied out the sugar and filled the bags with clean, brown sand, which counterfeited well. This the deacon laboriously carted to his barn, and only came to a sense of his loss when his wife at night attempted to sweeten his tea from the bags. This brought out from the deacon the following remark: 'I declare, when I felt that 'ar sand agrittin' between my teeth, I don't know but it was wicked, but I e'en a'most wished that there wouldn't never be another wreck!'” Lowell told the story with all the humour possible, rendering the deacon's remark with a tw.a.n.g and an emphatic dwelling on the double negative (a thing which Lowell believed we had suffered to drop out of polite speech unfortunately) with inimitable effect and most evident enjoyment. The substratum of the man was Yankee but probably no other of the stock has so enriched himself with the best of all lands and times. He had a most delicate sense of what was best worth while in all literatures and absorbed it to the full.

One of the greatest mistakes I ever made was in neglecting to become a member of his cla.s.s in Dante when the opportunity came to me. What an interpreter he was of the soul of the great Italian, and with what unerring instinct he penetrated to what was best in the sages and poets of the world everywhere! His own gifts as poet and thinker were of the finest, and they were set off with acquirements marvellous in their range and in the unerring precision with which they were selected. I recall him at a very impressive moment. Many regard Lowell's _Commemoration Ode_, read at the Commemoration in 1865 of the Harvard soldiers who had taken part in the Civil War, as the high-water mark of American poetry. Whether or not that claim is just I shall not debate, but it is a great composition and perhaps Lowell's best. The occasion was indeed a n.o.ble one. A mult.i.tude had collected in the college-yard and through it wound the brilliant procession of soldiers who had taken part in the war, marching to the drum and wearing for the last time the uniform in which they had fought. From Major-Generals and Admirals down to the high privates, all were in blue, and the sun glittered resplendent on epaulet and lace worn often by men who walked with difficulty, halting from old wounds. The exercises in the church, the singing of Luther's hymn, _A Mighty Fortress is our G.o.d_, the oration and the impressive prayer of Phillips Brooks were finished. The a.s.sembly collected under the great tent which filled the quadrangle formed by the street, Harvard and Hollis Halls and Holden Chapel. I sat at the corner by the side of Phillips Brooks. He was the Chaplain of the day and I had been honoured by a commission to speak for the rank and file. The speeches, though not always happy, preserved a good level of excellence. At length came Lowell. He stood with his back toward Hollis about midway of the s.p.a.ce. He was then in his best years, brown-haired, dark-eyed, rather short-necked, with a full strong beard, his intellectual face, an Elizabethan face, surmounting a st.u.r.dy body. His manner was not impa.s.sioned, he read from a ma.n.u.script with distinctness which could be heard everywhere, but I do not recall that his face kindled or his voice trembled. Even in the more elevated pa.s.sages, I think we hardly felt as he proceeded that it was the culmination of the day's utterances and that we were really then and there in an epoch-making event. Unfortunately for me my speech was yet to come and, unpractised as I was, I was uncomfortably nervous as to what I should say. I lost therefore the full effect of the masterpiece. One or two of the speakers on the programme had dropped out and behold it was my turn. The announcement of my name with a brief introduction from the chairman struck my ear, and it was for me to stand on my feet and do my best. My voice sounded out into the great s.p.a.ce in which the echo of Lowell's was scarcely silent. I spoke for the rank and file and in my whole career of nearly eighty years it was perhaps the culminating moment, when fate placed me in a juxtaposition so memorable.

In 1857 I sent a poem to the _Atlantic_ then just beginning under his editors.h.i.+p. My poem came back with the comment, ”Hardly good enough, but the writer certainly deserves encouragement.” This frost, though not unkind, nipped my budding aspirations in that direction. I hung my modest harp on the willows and have almost never since tw.a.n.ged the strings. At a later time in England I came into pleasant relations with Lowell and saw his tender side. His term as Minister to England had come to a close. He had just lost his wife and was in deep affliction, the sorrow telling upon his health, but he took kind thought for me and helped me zealously in my quest of materials for a considerable historical work. He enable me to approach august personages whom otherwise I could not have reached; in particular securing for me a great courtesy from the Duke of Cleveland, a descendant of Vane, who gave me _carte blanche_ to visit Raby Castle in Durham, Vane's former home, a magnificent seat not usually open to visitors but which I saw thoroughly. I have already mentioned the funeral of Lowell. It took place on a lovely day in the August of 1891. The procession pa.s.sed from Appleton Chapel to Mount Auburn, and I, hurrying on reached the open grave before the line arrived. It was a spot of great beauty in a dell below the pleasant Indian Ridge on which just above lies the grave of Longfellow. At a few rods' distance is the sunny bank where later was laid to rest Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Close at hand to the grave of Lowell lay his gifted wife, Maria White who wrote the lovely poem ”The Alpine Shepherd,” and the three brilliant and intrepid nephews who were slain in the Civil War. The old horn-beams, quaint and unusual trees, stand sentry on either hand.

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