Part 7 (1/2)

I saw the coffin lowered. Standing just behind Phillips Brooks, I heard for the last time the voice of my boyhood friend reading with tenderness the burial service. One final experience remained for me on that day which I especially treasure. Leaving the cemetery I walked the short distance to the gate of Elmwood, the birthplace and always the home of Lowell. This spot he especially loved, he knew its trees, every one, and the birds and squirrels that came to visit them. I stood at the gate looking toward the old mansion aloof among the woods. I had often stood there and looked toward the house, but now it had a different aspect; usually its doors and windows were tightly closed, but now everything was wide open, the mourners had not returned to the house and at the moment no living being was visible.

The windows and the portal looked out upon the late afternoon, in the dead silence; in the heightened feeling of the moment it seemed to me that the mansion had come to life, that it missed the fine spirit that had so lately flown forth from it, that with lids widely apart and distressful it looked forth into the great s.p.a.cious heavens after a loved soul that had pa.s.sed from it into the world beyond. It was only a dream of my excited fancy, but I shall always think of Elmwood as it was that afternoon.

I am so fortunate as to have a close a.s.sociation with the town of Concord. My first American ancestor, landing from his s.h.i.+p in 1635, went thither with the earliest settlers and established himself on the level at the west of the town, at that time I suppose the outmost Anglo-Saxon frontier of the Western continent. Seven generations of his descendants have lived in the town. I am in the eighth, and, though not native, and only transiently resident, I have a love for it and it is a town worth loving. It is fair by nature, pleasant hills rising among green levels and the placid river creeping toward the sea. It still maintains its vigorous town-meeting and holds well to the ancient traditions. The thirteen colonies made on its soil their first forcible resistance to British aggression and there is no village in America so a.s.sociated with great men of letters. When a boy of ten in 1844 I was swapped with a cousin, he going for a year to western New York, while I went for a year to the house of my aunt in Concord, the ancient homestead out of which eighty years before my great-grandfather had gone with gun in hand to take his part with the Minute Men. Emerson had just become famous through _Nature_, Th.o.r.eau was then a young man quite unknown to fame. The Alcotts the year before had lived next door to my aunt, Louisa, a child of twelve, and her sisters the ”Little Women” whom the world now knows so well.

Close to the Battle Ground stood the two tall gate-posts behind which lay the ”Old Manse” whose ”Mosses” Hawthorne was just then preserving for immortality. With all these I then, or a little later, came into touch and I can tell how the figures looked as scanned by the eyes of a boy.

Th.o.r.eau in those days was known in the town as an irregular, eccentric spirit, rather hopeless for any practical purpose. He could make a good lead-pencil but having mastered the art he dropped it, preferring to lead a vagabond life, loitering on the river and in the woods, rather to the disquietude of the community, though he had a comfortable home cared for by his good mother and sister. He housed himself in a wigwam at Walden Pond and was suspected of having started from the brands of his camp a forest fire which had spread far. This strange man, rumour said, had written a book no copy of which had ever been sold. It described a week on the Concord and Merrimac rivers. The edition fell dead from the press, and all the books, one thousand or more, he had collected in his mother's house, a queer library of these unsold books which he used to exhibit to visitors laughing grimly over his unfortunate venture in the field of letters. My aunt sent me one day to carry a message to Mrs. Th.o.r.eau and my rap on her door was answered by no other man than this odd son who, on the threshold received my message. He stood in the doorway with hair which looked as if it had been dressed with a pine-cone, inattentive grey eyes, hazy with far-away musings, an emphatic nose and disheveled attire that bore signs of tramps in woods and swamps. Thinking of the forest fire I fancied he smelled of smoke and peered curiously up the staircase behind him hoping I might get a glimpse of that queer library all of one book duplicated one thousand times. The story went that his artless mother used to say that Emerson, when he talked, imitated Henry, and I well recall a certain slow hesitation and peculiar upward intonation which made me think of Emerson at whose house I had often been. The _Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers_ found its public at last and I suppose a copy of the first edition, authenticated as having belonged to that queer library, would easily bring to-day in the market its weight in gold. Whether or not Th.o.r.eau deserves great fame the critics sometimes discuss. I heard a distinguished man say that he was greatly inferior to Gilbert White of Selbourne, and I myself feel that Lowell in some of his essays recording his study of the nature life at Elmwood equalled in fine insight, and surpa.s.sed in expression the observer at Concord. Then in these later years we have had John Muir and John Burroughs who cannot be set low, but among American writers Th.o.r.eau was the pioneer of nature-study. Audubon had preceded him but he worked mainly with the brush; to mult.i.tudes Th.o.r.eau opened the gate to the secrets of our natural environment. The subtle delicacy of the gra.s.s-blade, the crystals of the snowflake, the icicle, the marvel of the weird lines traced by the flocks of wild geese athwart the heavens as they migrated, these he watched and recorded with loving accuracy and sensitive poetic feeling as no one in our land before had done. I have thrown a stone upon the cairn at Walden Pond which has now grown so high through the tributes of his grateful admirers. I shall throw still others in grateful admiration if the opportunity comes to me.

Many years ago I used to feel that Louisa Alcott and I were in a certain way bracketed together. Both were children of Concord in a sense, she by adoption and I through the fact that it had been the home of my forbears for seven generations. We were nearly of the same age and simultaneously made our first ventures into the world of letters, taking the same theme, the Civil War. One phase of this she portrayed in her _Hospital Sketches_, another, I in my _Colour Guard_. So we started in the race together but Louisa soon distanced me, emerging presently into matchless proficiency in her books for children. I sometimes saw her after she had become famous when she was attuning sweetly the hearts of mult.i.tudes of children with her fine humanity. She was a stately handsome woman with a most gracious and un.o.btrusive manner. She mingled with her neighbours, one of the quietest members of the circle. Said a kinswoman of mine who lived within a few doors:

It is so hard to think of Louisa as being a distinguished personage; she sits down here with her knitting or brings over her bread to be baked in my oven as anybody might do, and chats about village matters, as interested over the engagements of the girls and sympathising with those in sorrow as if she had no broader interest.

She was indeed one of those who bore her honours meekly. I recall her vividly when she was well past youth, in the enjoyment of the substantial gains success had brought. In her childhood she had known pinching poverty, for her philosophic father could never exchange his lucubrations for bread and clothes, philosophising, however, none the less. But her success brought with it no flush, only an opportunity for her pleasant service. In these years my mood toward her had quite changed; at first I had thought of her as a compet.i.tor, perhaps as on my level. When I learned, however, that about that time she had been reading my _History of German Literature_ with approval, I felt that I was greatly honoured, that a mind of high distinction had condescended to notice my pages. During the '80s when the ”School of Philosophy” was holding its sessions in the rustic temple on the Lexington Road where her Orphic father was hierophant, it was rumoured that Louisa looked somewhat askance upon the sublimated discussions of the brotherhood that gathered. What was said was very wise, but far removed from what one finds in children's books, but Louisa was sometimes present, a dignified hostess to the strangers who came, taking her modest part among the women in the entertainment of the guests but never in the conclave as a partic.i.p.ant. Alas! that she went so prematurely to her grave in ”Sleepy Hollow”!

Hawthorne came into my consciousness when I was a boy of ten at school near the tall stone gate-posts immortalised by the great novelist as guarding the entrance to the Old Manse. The big gambrel-roofed building standing close to the Battle Ground as it stood on the 19th of April, 1775, was unpainted and weather-stained, the structure showing dark among the trees as one looked from the road. All the world knows it as described outside and in by its famous tenant. It is a shrine which may well evoke breathless interest. The ancient wainscoting, the ample low-studded rooms, the quaint fireplace, and at the rear toward the west the windows with their small panes on some of which Hawthorne made inscriptions. ”Every leaf and twig is outlined against the sky,” or words to that effect, ”scratched with my wife's diamond ring”; here the sunset pours in gorgeously but there is more of shadow than sunlight about the Old Manse, and that is befitting for a dwelling with a.s.sociations somewhat sombre. In later years Hawthorne occupied a house on the Lexington Road, new and modern, writing there some famous books in an upper study said to be accessible only through a trap-door, but the Old Manse was the appropriate home for him. It was there that his young genius produced its earlier fruit and it deserves to be particularly cherished. As a little child I went once with my father and mother to Brook Farm in West Roxbury, at the time when the community was most interesting. The famous disciples of Fourier were then, I suppose, for the most part present, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, George Ripley, George William Curtis, Charles A.

Dana and the rest, but I was too young to take note of them. I recall only George Ripley, the head of the enterprise, in a rough working-blouse who welcomed us at the gate. My father and he were old friends and as supper-time came and the community gathered singly and in groups in the dining-hall from the fields and groves outside, he said to my father: ”Your seat at the table will be next to Hawthorne, but I shall not introduce you, Mr. Hawthorne prefers not to be introduced to people.” It was a cropping out of the strange aloofness for which Hawthorne was marked. He could do his part in the day's work, be a man among men, d.i.c.ker with the importers at the Salem Custom House and as Consul at Liverpool, rub effectively with the traders, but his choice was always for solitude, he liked to go for days without speaking to a human being and to live withdrawn from the contacts of the world, even from his neighbours and family. Probably it was because he was so thoroughly a recluse that I recall seeing Hawthorne only once, although he was in the village in whose streets I was constantly pa.s.sing. Driving one day on the road near his home a companion exclaimed, ”There goes Mr. Hawthorne on the sidewalk!” I put my head forward quickly to get a glimpse from the cover of the carriage of so famous a personage, and at the roadside was a fine, tall, athletic person with handsome features. My quick movement forward in the carriage he took for a bow and he returned it raising his hat with gentlemanly courtesy, it was all through a mistake that I got this bow from Hawthorne but all the same I treasure it. A sister-in-law of his, who was often an inmate of his home, told me that Hawthorne really believed in ghosts. It will be remembered that in the introduction to the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, Hawthorne speaks of the spectre of an ancient minister who haunted it, the rustling of his silken gown was sometimes heard in the hallways. My friend attributed this pa.s.sage to something which happened during one of her visits. She sat one evening with her sister and Hawthorne in the low-studded living-room, and, as was often the case, in silence.

She thought she heard in the entry the rustling of silk, it might have been a whistling of the wind or the swaying of a drapery, but it seemed to her like the sweeping along of a train of silk. At the moment she thought that Mrs. Hawthorne was pa.s.sing through the entry, but rousing herself from her abstraction she saw her sister sitting quiet and remembered that she had been so sitting for a considerable interval. ”Why, I distinctly heard,” said she, ”the rustling of a silk gown in the entry!” The sisters rose and went into the hallway for an explanation, but all was dark and still, no draperies were stirring, no wind whistled, and they returned to their chairs, talking for a moment over the mysterious sound, then relapsing into their former quiet. Hawthorne meantime sat dreaming, apparently not noticing the light ripple in the quiet of the evening; but not long after--when my friend read the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, she found that the incident had made an impression upon him and that he interpreted the sound as a ghostly happening. She told me another story which she said she had directly from Hawthorne. During a sojourn in Boston he often went to the reading-room of the Athenaeum and was particularly interested to see a certain newspaper. This paper he often found in the hands of an old man and he was sometimes annoyed because the old man retained it so long. The old man lived in a suburb and for some reason was equally interested with himself in that paper. This went on for weeks until one day Hawthorne, entering the room, found the paper as usual in the hands of this man. Hawthorne sat down and waited patiently as often before until the old man had finished. After a time the man rose, put on his hat and overcoat, and took his departure. As the door of the reading-room closed behind him Hawthorne took up the paper which lay in disorder as the man had left it, when, lo and behold, his eye fell in the first column on a notice of the old man's death. He was at the moment lying dead in his house in the suburbs and yet Hawthorne had beheld him but a moment before in his usual guise reading the paper in the Athenaeum! My friend said that Hawthorne told her the story quietly without attempt at explanation and she believed his thought was that he had actually seen a ghost. The readers of Hawthorne will recall pa.s.sages which are consonant with the idea that Hawthorne believed in ghosts.

No other author has affected me quite so profoundly as did Hawthorne.

The period of my development from childhood through youth to maturity was coeval with the time of his literary activities. The first vivid impression I received from books came from his stories for children, _Grandfather's Chair_, _Famous Old People_, and _The Liberty Tree_; when somewhat older I read _The Rill from the Town Pump_ and _Little Annie's Ramble_, still later came the weird creations in which Hawthorne's expanding genius manifested itself, such as _The Minister's Black Veil_, _Rappaccini's Daughter_, and _The Celestial Railroad_. And not less in young manhood I was awed and absorbed in the great works of his maturity, _The Scarlet Letter_, _The Blithedale Romance_, _The House of the Seven Gables_, and the _Marble Faun._ Meat and drink as they were to me in my youth and first entrance into life, I naturally feel that the author of these books was in mind profoundly powerful.

In point of genius among our Americans I should set no man before him.

He was not a moral inspirer nor a leader, he gave to no one directly any spiritual uplift, nor did he help one directly to strength in fighting the battles of life. He was a peerless artist portraying marvellously the secret things of the human soul, his concrete pictures taken from the old Puritan society, from the New England of his day and from the pa.s.sionate Italian life. He portrays but he draws no lesson any more than Shakespeare, his books are pictures of the souls of men, of the sweet and wholesome things and also the weakness, the sin and the morbid defect. These having been revealed the reader is left to his own inferences. It is fully made plain that he was a soft-hearted man, at any rate in his earlier time. The stories he wrote at the outset for children are often full of sweetness and sympathy. But as he went on with his work these qualities are less apparent, the spirit of the artist more and more prevailing, until he paints with relentless realism even what is hideous, not approving or condemning; it is part of life and must be set down. Many have thought it strange that Hawthorne apparently had no patriotism. In our Civil War he stood quite indifferent, a marked contrast with the men among whom he lived and who like him have literary eminence. These pa.s.sages stand in his diary and letters. ”February 14, 1862, Frank Pierce came here to-night.... He is bigoted as to the Union and sees nothing but ruin without it. Whereas I should not much regret an ultimate separation.” ”At present we have no country.... New England is really quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can take in. I have no kindred with or leaning toward the abolitionists.” But his coolness to his country's welfare was of a piece with the general coolness toward well and ill in the affairs of the world. Humanity rolls before him as it did before Shakespeare, sometimes weak, sometimes heroic, depressed, exultant, suffering, happy. He did not concern himself to regulate its movement, to heighten its joy, or mitigate its sorrow.

His work was to portray it as it moved, and in that conception of his mission he established his masterfulness as an artist, though it abates somewhat, does it not? from his wholeness as a man.

Some years ago in introducing Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson to an audience in St. Louis, I said that our great-grandfathers had stood together with the Minute Men of Concord at the North Bridge on the 19th of April, 1775. His ancestor as their minister inspiring them with the idea of freedom, my ancestor as an officer, who by word and deed kept the farmers firm before the British volleys. The old-time connection between the two families persisted. Ralph Waldo Emerson and my father were contemporaries coming through the Harvard gate into the small company of Unitarian ministers at about the same period and somewhat a.s.sociated in their young manhood. Mrs. Emerson had been Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, baptised, into the old Pilgrim Parish by the father of my mother. Lydia Jackson and my mother had been girls together, and good friends. It was natural, therefore, that, with these antecedents when I as a young boy arrived in Concord, I should come into touch with the Emersons. They were indeed pleasant friends to me, both Mr. and Mrs.

Emerson receiving with kindness the child whose parents they had known when children. The Emerson house on the Lexington Road is to-day a world-renowned shrine, sixty years ago it was the quiet home of a peaceful family, lovely as now through its natural beauty but not yet sought out by many pilgrims. The fame of Emerson, only recently established by his _Nature_ and the earlier poems, was just beginning to spread into world-wide proportions.

I have before me his image, in his vigorous years, the sloping rather narrow shoulders, the slender frame erect and sinewy but never robust, and a keen, firm face. In his glance was complete kindliness and also profound penetration. His nose was markedly expressive, sharp, and well to the fore. In his lips there was geniality as well as firmness.

His smooth hair concealed a head and brow not large but well rounded.

His face was always without beard. Though slight, he was vigorous and the erect figure striding at a rapid pace could be encountered any day in all weathers, not only on the streets but in the fields and woods.

Unlike his neighbour Hawthorne his instincts were always social. He mingled affably with low and high and I have never heard a more hearty tribute to him than came from an Irish washwoman, his neighbour, who only knew him as he chatted with her over the fence about the round of affairs that interested her. He always had a smile and a pleasant word for the school-children and at town-meeting bore his part among the farmers in discussing the affairs of the community. His voice in particular bespoke the man. It had a rich resonance and a subtle quality that gave to the most cursory listener an impression of culture. His speech was deliberate, sometimes hesitating, and his phrases often, even when he talked on simple themes, had especial point and appropriateness.

As a child I recall him among groups of children in his garden a little aloof but beaming with a happy smile. At a later time, when I was in college, we used sometimes to walk the twenty miles from Cambridge to Concord and the student group always found in him a hospitable entertainer. By that time he had reached the height of his fame. Those of us who sought him had been readers of _Nature_ or the poems, of _Representative Men_, and of _English Traits_.

For my own part while I did not always understand his thought, much of it was entering into my very fibre. In particular the essays on self-reliance and idealism were moulding my life. We approached him with some awe, ”If he asks me where I live,” said one of our number, a boy who was slain in the Civil War, ”I shall tell him I can be found at No. So-and-so of such an alley, but if you mean to predicate concerning the spiritual ent.i.ty, I dwell in the temple of the infinite and I breathe the breath of truth.” But when Emerson met us at the gate, things were not at all on a high transcendental plane. There was a hearty ”Good-morning,” significant from him as he stood among the syringas, and there were sandwiches and strawberries in profusion, a plain bread-and-b.u.t.ter atmosphere very pleasant to us after a long and dusty tramp. On one occasion Emerson withdrew into the background, we thought too much, while he gave the front place in the library, after he had superintended royally the satisfaction of our bodily needs, to his neighbour Bronson Alcott. Mr. Alcott white-haired and oracular, talked to us about Shakespeare. There was probably a secondary sense in every line of Shakespeare which would become apparent to all such as attained the necessary fineness of soul. Perhaps we should find in this the gospel of a new Covenant in which Shakespeare would be the great teacher and leader. Mysteries were gathering about him, who was he? Who really wrote his plays and poems? The adumbrations of a new supernatural figure were looming in the conception of the world.

Mr. Alcott mused through the afternoon in characteristic fas.h.i.+on and Emerson sat with us, silently absorbing the mystic speculation.

But Mr. Emerson was not always silent. A good friend of his who was akin to me and over partial, invited him to her house with a little circle of neighbours and lo, I was to furnish the entertainment! I had written a college poem and with some sinking of heart I learned that I was to read it to this company of which Emerson was to be a member.

I faced the music and for half an hour rolled off my stanzas. At the close, my kinswoman arranged that I should talk with Emerson in a corner by ourselves and for another half-hour he talked to me. I am bound to say that he said little about my poem, but devoted himself almost entirely to an enthusiastic outpouring over Walt Whitman's _Leaves of Gra.s.s_, an advance copy of which had just been sent him. A stronger commendation of a piece of literary work than he gave it would be hard to conceive. He had been moved by it to the depths and his forecast for its author was a fame of the brightest. It was then I first heard of Walt Whitman. Soon after the world heard much of him and it still hears much of him. Emerson did not confine the expression of his admiration of Walt Whitman to me, as the world knows; he expressed it with an equal outspokenness to the poet, who curiously enough thought it proper to print it in gilt letters on the cover of his book, ”I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

To do that was certainly a violation of literary comity, but who shall give laws to rough-riding genius! It is a penalty of eminence to be made sponsor unwittingly before the public for men and things when reticence would seem better. At any rate it brought Whitman well into notice and I have never heard, rough diamond though he undoubtedly was, that Walt Whitman's withers were wrung by this breach of confidence.

There is a little nook by Gore Hall in Cambridge with which I have a queer medley of a.s.sociations. One night I was tossed in a blanket there during my initiation into the Hasty Pudding Club. Precisely there I met Emerson rather memorably on the Commemoration Day in 1865 when he said to me, glancing at my soldier's uniform, in very simple words but with an intonation that betrayed deep feeling, ”This day belongs to you.” Immediately after, hard by I shook hands with Meade, the towering stately victor of Gettysburg in the full uniform of a corps commander, in contrast indeed to the slight, plainly-dressed philosopher. And only the other day I helped my little granddaughter to feed the grey squirrels in the same green nook from which the rollicking boys, the sage, and the warrior have so long since vanished.

I have heard it remarked by a man of much literary discrimination that Emerson's poetic gift was pre-eminent and that he should have made verse and not prose his princ.i.p.al medium for expression. As it is his poems are few, his habitual medium being prose. The critic attributed this to a distrust which Emerson felt of his power of dealing with poetic form, the harmonious arrangement of lines. He felt that Emerson was right in his judgment of himself, that there was a defect here, and that it was well for him to choose as he did. All this I hesitate to accept. As regards form, while the verse of Emerson certainly is sometimes rough, few things in poetry are more exquisite than many verses which all will recall. What stanzas ever flowed more sweetly than these written for the dedication of the Concord monument? ”By the rude bridge that arched the flood,” or the little poem on the snow-storm, ”Announced by all the trumpets of the sky arrives the snow.” _The Boston Hymn_, too, though in parts informal to the point of carelessness, has pa.s.sages of the finest music,

”The rocky nook with hill-tops three, Looked eastward from the farms And twice each day the flowing sea Took Boston in its arms.”

Emerson when he gave his mind to it could sing as harmoniously as the best. Possibly we ought to regret that he did not write for the most part in verse. It is verse which comes and clings most closely to our souls and which memory holds most permanently. Prose is the inferior medium when a great utterance is addressed to men, it is the singer pre-eminently who holds our hearts and lives forever. But Emerson chose to be what he was and we are thankful for him. Many were vexed with Matthew Arnold whom we thought depreciatory, but I find no fault with his summing up of Emerson, ”as the friend of all those who seek to live in the spirit.” His prose and poetry are a precious possession and we should be grateful for both, and for him. But my purpose here as always is not to criticise but only to touch the light outside things, pausing at the edge of profundities.

I knew Emerson when I was a child and I also knew him when I was well advanced in years at a time when, of course, he was close upon his end. His old age was pathetic. As often happens his memory failed while his other faculties were strong and the embarra.s.sment of the thinker aroused sadness in those who came near him as the trusty servant fell short, though the mind in general was active. Emerson felt that I had put him under some obligation by giving him the first portrait he had ever seen of his faithful German disciple and translator Hermann Grimm. Perhaps that helped the welcome with which I was received when I went to see him not far from the end.