Part 7 (2/2)

I had as a fellow-guest a man who had long been intimate with him and whom he was very glad to see; talking after tea in the library Emerson said, ”I want to tell you about a friend in Germany, his name I cannot remember,” and he moved to and fro uneasily, in his effort to recall it. ”This friend with whom we have taken tea to-night, whose name also I cannot remember,” here again came a distressed look at the failure of his faculty, ”I cannot remember his name either, but he can tell you of this German friend whose name I have also forgotten.” It was a sorrow to see the breaking down of a great spirit and his agitation as he was conscious of his waning power. And yet so far as I could see, it was only the memory that was going; the intellectual strength was still apparent and the amiability of his spirit was perhaps even more manifest than in the years when he was in the full possession of himself. This came out in little things; he was over-anxious at the table lest the hospitality should come short, troubled about the supply of b.u.t.ter and apple-sauce, and soon after I saw him on his knees on the hearth taking care that the fire should catch the wood to abate the evening coolness that was gathering in the room. At the same time his mood was playful. Mrs. Emerson sat at hand, a woman in her old age of striking beauty, with her silver hair beneath a cap of lace, her violet eyes, and her white face. Miss Ellen Emerson, too, was present, s.h.i.+elding her father in his decline like a guardian angel. Mrs. Emerson spoke with pleasure of her old life at Plymouth.

”Ah, Plymouth,” broke in Emerson, ”that town of towns. We shall never hear the last of Plymouth!” And so he rallied his wife merrily over her patriotic love for her birthplace. The time was coming for him to go and he went serenely, the vital cord softly and gradually disengaged. In Sleepy Hollow lie near each other the four memorable graves, Hawthorne's, Th.o.r.eau's, Louisa Alcott's, and Emerson's. I know the spot well, on the ridge which slopes up from the lower ground, for there my own kin lie buried. Upon the same ridge rise the tall oracular pines and there is always a sweet murmur which the feeling heart understands as a sub-conscious requiem breathed by the ”Nature”

of which these fine spirits were the interpreters.

A day or two after entering college I made one of a group of freshmen, who, as the dusk fell, were working off their surplus energy by jumping over the posts along the curbstone of a quiet street. One of our number had an unfair advantage, his length of leg being so great that as he bestrode the post, he scarcely needed to take his feet from the ground, while for the rest of us a good hop was necessary fairly to clear the top. That is my earliest memory of Phillips Brooks. Big as he was, he was a year, perhaps two years, younger than most of us, and had the boyishness proper to his immaturity. He had come from his long training in the Boston Latin School, was reputed, like the rest of his cla.s.s, to be able to repeat the Latin and Greek grammars from beginning to end, exceptions, examples, and all, and to have at his tongue's end other acquirements equally wonderful in the eyes of us boys who in our distant Western homes had had a smaller chance. He was an excellent scholar without needing to apply himself, and perhaps had more distinction in the student societies than in the cla.s.s-room.

Socially he was good-natured and playful, never aggressive, too modest to be a leader, rather reticent. It was with surprise that I heard Brooks for the first time in a college society. The quiet fellow of a sudden poured out a torrent of words and, young though I was, I felt that they were not empty. There was plenty of thought and well-arranged knowledge. This pregnant fluency always characterised his public deliverances. Of late years it has been reported that he had at first a defect of speech, and to this the extraordinary momentum of his utterance was due. In the early time I never heard of this. He did not stammer, nor was there other impediment; only this preternaturally rapid outpouring on occasion, from a man usually quiet. When I heard him preach in later years the peculiarity remained. It was the Phillips Brooks of the Inst.i.tute of 1770, matured, however, into n.o.ble spiritual power.

Brooks had attained nearly or quite his full height on entering college, nor was he slender. His large frame was too loosely knit to admit of his becoming an athlete. He had no interest in outdoor sports. I do not recall that he was warmly diligent in study or general reading. His mind worked quickly and easily. Without effort he stood well in the cla.s.s, absorbing whatever other knowledge he touched without much searching. His countenance and head in boyhood were noticeably fine, the forehead broad and full, the beardless face lighting up readily with an engaging smile, the eyes large and l.u.s.trous. It was evident that a good and able man must come out from the boy Phillips Brooks, but no one, not even President Walker, who was credited with an almost uncanny penetration in divining the future of his boys, would have predicted the career of Brooks. Though decorous and high-minded he was not marked as a religious man. If he were so, he kept it to himself. Though sometimes hilarious, he was never ungentle or inconsiderate, a wholesome, happy youth, having due thought for others and for his own walk and conversation, but without touch of formal piety. When I was initiated into the Hasty Pudding Club, I recognised in a tall fiend whose trouser legs were very apparent beneath the too scanty black drapery which enveloped him, no other than Phillips Brooks. He was one of the most vociferous of the imps who tossed me in the blanket, and later, when the elaborate ma.n.u.script I had prepared was brought forth, was conspicuously energetic in daubing with hot mush from a huge wooden spoon the sheets I had composed with much painstaking. The grand event in the ”Pudding”

of our time was the performance of Fielding's extravaganza of _Tom Thumb_. I think it was the club's first attempt at an operatic performance, and it was prepared with great care. I suppose I am to-day the only survivor among those who took part, and it is a sombre pleasure to recall the old-time frolic. The great promoter of the undertaking was Theodore Lyman, able and forceful afterward as soldier, scientist, and congressman, who died prematurely; but the music and details were arranged by Joseph C. Heywood, later a devout Catholic, ending his career in Rome as Chamberlain of Pope Leo XIII.

In the cast Heywood was King Arthur and Lyman, general of the army.

There were besides, a throng of warriors, lords, and ladies wonderful to behold. The costumes were elaborate. Old trunks and attics of our friends were ransacked for ancient finery and appointments that might be made to serve. Provision was made for thrilling stage effects, chief among them a marvellous cow which at a critical moment swallowed Tom Thumb, and then with much eructation worked out painfully on the ba.s.s-viol, belched him forth as if discharged from a catapult. The music was an adaptation of popular airs, operatic and otherwise, to the words of Fielding, and was fairly good, rendered as it was by fresh young voices and an orchestra whose members played in the Pierian Sodality. The merriment of the lines was more robust than delicate, but with some pruning it pa.s.sed. The bill of announcement, which was hung up in the Pudding room, and which possibly is still preserved, was very elaborately and handsomely designed, and I think was the work of Alexander Aga.s.siz, who had much skill of that kind.

The performers were all strenuous and some capable, but the hit of the evening was Phillips Brooks, who personated the giantess Glumdalca to perfection. He was then nineteen, and had reached his full stature.

He was attired in flowing skirts and befitting bodice, and wore a towering head-dress of feather dusters or something similar, which swept the ceiling as he strode. I had been cast originally for the Queen, but it was afterwards judged that I had special qualifications for the part of Princess. Like the youths in Comus, my unrazored lips in those days were as smooth as Hebe's, and I had a slenderness that was quite in keeping. Dressed in an old brocade gown, an heirloom from the century before, with a lofty white wig, and proper patches upon my pink cheeks, I essayed the role of _une belle dame sans merci_.

Brooks and I were rivals for the affection of Tom Thumb, and I do not recall which succeeded. The tragedy was most extreme. In the closing scene the entire cast underwent destruction, strewing the stage with a picturesque heap of slain. We were not so very dead, for the victims near the foot-lights in order to give the curtain room to fall, drew up their legs or rolled out of the way, in a spirit of polite accommodation. The most impressive part of the spectacle was the defunct giantess, whose wide-spreading draperies and head-gear, as Brooks came down with a well-studied crash, took up so much of the floor that the rest of us had no room left to die in dignity. The piece was so much of a success that we performed it again at the house of Theodore Lyman, in Brookline,--and still again, at Chickering Hall in Boston.

Though Brooks could frolic upon occasion, his mood in his student days was prevailingly grave, and as he matured, warmed, and deepened into earnest religious conviction. My own close a.s.sociation with him came to an end at our graduation. Our respective fates led us in fields widely apart, and we met only at rare intervals. Ten years after graduation we came together in a way for me memorable. He was already held in the affectionate reverence of mult.i.tudes, and perhaps established in the position in which he so long stood as the most moving and venerated of American preachers. At the commemoration for the Harvard soldiers, in 1865, he was the chaplain, and his prayer shares with the _Commemoration Ode_ of Lowell the admiration of men as an utterance especially uplifting. My humble function on that day was to speak for the rank and file, and Brooks and I, as cla.s.smates, sat elbow to elbow at the table under the great tent. He was charmingly genial and brotherly. His old playfulness came out as he rallied me on the deterioration he noticed in my table manners, due no doubt to my life in camp, and rebuked me with mock sternness for appropriating his portion of our common chicken. With evident pleasure, he drew out of his pocket the _Nation_, then just beginning, and showed me a kind notice of my _Thinking Bayonet_, written by Charles Eliot Norton. But behind the smile and the joke lay a new dignity and earnestness, a quality he had taken on since the days of our old comrades.h.i.+p. So it always was as we met transiently while the decades pa.s.sed until the threshold of old age lay across the path for both of us. Now and then I had from him an affectionate letter. One of these I found profoundly touching. Theodore Lyman lay prostrate with a lingering and painful illness from which he never rose. Brooks wrote that he had carried to him my _Life of Young Sir Henry Vane_, and read from it to our dying friend. My story had interest for them, and I felt that whatever might befall my book I had not worked in vain if two such men found it worthy.

Phillips Brooks early had recognition as the most important religious influence of his time, and his spirit was not less broad-minded than it was fervent. In the mult.i.tudes that felt the power of his impa.s.sioned address were included men and women of the most various views, and he quickened the life of the spirit in all households of faith. His sympathies were most catholic, and this anecdote clearly illuminates his broad-mindedness. I had dropped into a Boston bookstore on a quiet morning; Brooks presently came in to browse over the new issues on the counters. There was no one to disturb us, as we enjoyed this our last conversation together. He spoke of Channing. ”Do you know,” said he, ”when Dean Stanley came over here I went to East Boston to see him on his s.h.i.+p. He said to me almost at once, 'Where is Mount Auburn?' Why, said I, how strange that the first thing you inquire about as you arrive is a cemetery! 'But is not Channing buried there?' said he. I told him I did not know. 'Well, he is and I want to go at once to the grave of Channing!' So as soon as we could,”

continued Phillips Brooks, ”we took a carriage and drove to Mount Auburn to visit the grave of Channing.” He sympathised fully with the admiration felt by his friend, the great English churchman, for Channing, and gladly did him homage, and his talk flowed on in channels that showed his heart was warm toward men of all creeds who were inspired by the higher life. This n.o.ble candour of mind was a marked element of his power, and has endeared his memory among scores of sects that too often clash. How sweetly unifying in the midst of a jarring Christendom has been the spirit of Phillips Brooks!

After this I saw him only once. It was at the funeral of James Russell Lowell. In Appleton Chapel he stood in his robes, gentle and powerful, as he read the burial service. When the body was committed to the grave I stood just behind him and heard his voice in the last hallowed sentences, ”Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and the spirit to the G.o.d who gave it.” I never heard that voice again.

CHAPTER IX

MEN OF SCIENCE

In England, in the fall of 1870, I missed an opportunity to see the great scientific men of the time. Faraday was still active, and in the full ripeness of his fame. Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Sir Joseph Hooker, Joule, Lyell, Murchison were in the midst of their best work, and probably all or most of them were present at the meeting of the British a.s.sociation, which took place that year somewhere in the west of England. Miss Frances Power Cobbe, with whom I had for some time maintained a correspondence, growing out of the interest I felt in her _Intuitive Morals_, and other writings, invited me to accompany her to the meeting, at which, introduced by her, I might have had interesting interviews. I let the chance go by, and feel to-day that my memory stands impoverished in that it holds no first-hand knowledge of the lights, who in their century were the glory of their country and the world.

In Germany I was more fortunate. Arriving at Heidelberg at a time before its high prestige had suffered much diminution, I found in all the four Faculties men of great distinction. One hears that in the stern centralising to which since 1870 Germany has been subjected the outer universities have suffered, their strength, their able teachers, namely, being drawn away for a brilliant concentration at Berlin.

In the little university town of those days students and professors rubbed closely and great men were sometimes found in odd environments.

Expressing once a desire to see a certain venerable theologian of wide fame, I was told he was sure to be found on such and such evenings in a well-known _bier locale_, and there I had opportunity to observe him, an aged and withered figure, with a proper stein of the amber fluid frothing at his side, and a halo from an active pipe enwreathing his grey hair, as he joked and gossiped familiarly with his fellow-loiterers about the heavy oak table. At another time I was among surroundings less rough, the guest-room of a club of the finer world, curtained and carpeted, and made attractive with pictures, flowers, and music. A company of ladies and gentlemen sat sipping _Maiwein_ and _Mark grafler_, while a conjurer entertained them with his tricks. During one of these, desiring a confederate from the lookers-on, he approached a slender and refined-looking man, who was following the necromancer's proceedings with as much interest as anybody. The wizard's air of deference, and the respectful looks of the company led me to infer that he was a man above the common, but he took part affably in what was going on, helped out the trick, and laughed and wondered with the rest when it succeeded. I presently learned to my surprise and amus.e.m.e.nt that the amiable confederate of the conjurer was no other than the physicist Kirchoff, then in fresh and brilliant fame as the inventor of the spectroscope and the initiator of the scientific method known as spectrolysis. The fact has long been known that a prism properly contrived will decompose a ray of white light into the seven primary colours, but the broad and narrow bands running across the variegated scheme of the spectrum had either escaped notice or been neglected as phenomena not significant.

Now came, however, my genial fellow-guest of the Heidelberg Club, detecting that the lines of the spectrum were one thing or another according to the substance emitting the light, and forthwith the world became aware of a discovery of vast moment. The light of the sun, and of the stars more distant than the sun, could be a.n.a.lysed or spectrolised, and a certain knowledge was shed of what was burning there in the immensely distant s.p.a.ces. We can know what const.i.tutes a star as unerringly as we know the const.i.tuents of the earth. Still more, among the supposed elements to which painstaking chemists had reduced composite matter, many were found by the all-discerning prism to be not ultimate, but themselves susceptible of subtler division.

In fact here was a method of chemical and physical a.n.a.lysis, much more powerful, and also more delicate, than had before been known, and the idea of the scientists as to the make-up of the material universe deepened and widened wondrously. I sat often among the crowd of students in Kirchoff's lecture-room, watching the play of his delicate features as he unravelled mysteries which till he showed the way were a mere hopeless knot. Near him as he spoke, on a table were the wand, the rings, the vials, above all a spectroscope with its prisms, the apparatus with which the magician solved the universe. Once, as I stood near him, he indicated in a polite sentence, with a gesture toward the table, that I was free to use these appliances. In the depth of my unknowledge I felt I could not claim to be even a tyro, and was duly abashed beneath the penetrating eye. But it is interesting to think that for a moment once I held the attention of so potent a Prospero.

In those days the name of Kirchoff was coupled always with that of an a.s.sociate, the chemist Bunsen, when there was mention of spectrum-a.n.a.lysis; and in my time at Heidelberg, Bunsen was at hand and I became as familiar with his figure as with Kirchoff. In frame Bunsen was of the burly burgomaster type not rare among the Teutons, and as I saw him in his laboratory to which I sometimes gained access through students of his, he moved about in some kind of informal _schlafrock_ or working dress of ample dimensions, with his large head crowned by a peculiar cap. On the tables within the s.p.a.ces flickered numerously the ”Bunsen burners,” his invention, and it was easy to fancy as one saw him, surrounded by the large company of reverent disciples, that you were in the presence of the hierophant of some abstruse and mysterious cult, in whose honour waved the many lambent flames. I think he was unmarried, without domestic ties, and lived almost night and day among his crucibles and retorts, devoted to his science and pupils toward whom he showed a regard almost fatherly.

In his lecture-room, in more formal dress he was less picturesque, but still a man to arouse deep interest. He was in the front rank of the chemists of all time, and I suppose had equal merit with Kirchoff in the momentous discovery in which their names are linked.

There was, however, at this time in Heidelberg a scientist probably of greater prestige than even these, whose contemporary influence was more dominant, and whose repute is now, and likely to be hereafter more prevailing. In my walks in a certain quiet street, I sometimes met a man who made an unusual impression of dignity and power. He had the bearing of a leader of men in whatever sphere he might move, ma.s.sive and well-statured, his dress not obtrusive but carefully appointed, with an eye and face to command. His manner was courteous, not domineering, and I wondered who the able, high-bred gentleman might be, for he carried all that in his air as he pa.s.sed along the street. It was the ill.u.s.trious Helmholtz, then in his best years, with great achievements behind him and before. His researches in many fields were profound and far extending. I suppose his genius was at its best when dealing with the pervasive imponderable ether that extends out from the earth into the vast planetary s.p.a.ces in whose vibrations are conditioned the phenomena of light. No subject of investigation can be more elusive. The mind that could grapple with this and arrive at the secrets and laws of the subtle medium through which the human eye receives impression is indeed worthy of our veneration. Probably, excepting Humboldt, no German scientist in these later centuries has reached such eminence. The fields of the two men were widely different. The one we know best as the scientific traveller, roaming the earth over, and reducing to ordered knowledge what can be perceived of its fauna and flora, of the strata that underlie it, the oceans that toss upon it, the atmosphere that surrounds it. The other roved not widely, but keeping to his lenses and calculations, penetrated perhaps more profoundly. Helmholtz, a well-born youth, began his career as a surgeon in the Prussian army, and his service there, no doubt, contributed to the manly carriage for which he was conspicuous. He married a lady of a n.o.ble house of Wuertemberg, and moved in an environment conducive to courtly manners.

Heidelberg, like the German universities in general well understood that ability in its teachers, and not a pompous architectural display, makes a great inst.i.tution. Its buildings were scattered and unpretending. Helmholtz had a lecture-room and laboratory apart, in a structure modern and graceful, but modest in its appeal. Here he discoursed to reverent throngs in tones never loud or confident. It is for wiseacres and charlatans to declaim and domineer. The masters are deferential in the presence of the sublimities and of the intelligences they are striving to enlighten.

In Germany I saw the great lights of science from afar, coming into relations of intimacy only with one or two _privat-docents_, young men struggling precariously for a foothold. One such striver I came to know well, a young man gifted but physically crippled, who, being anxious to get up his English, as I was to get up my German, entered with me into an arrangement to converse in these alternately.

We were about on a par in our knowledge or ignorance of the speech not native to us, and helped each other merrily out of the pitfalls into which we stumbled, according as English or German ruled the time.

I was aghast to find that I had been telling my new German acquaintances that while a married man, I had _deserted_ and _cast off_ my wife and little boy in America, when I meant to say only that I had left them behind during my temporary sojourn. A treacherous inseparable prefix had imparted to my ”leaving them” an unlooked-for emphasis. The laugh for the moment was on me, but only for the moment. A little later Knopff was telling me of the old ma.n.u.scripts in the library illuminated gorgeously by ”de pious and skilful monkeys of de Middle Ages.” He was a bright fellow, and I have hoped I might encounter his name in some honourable connection. If he survived it was as one of the _unbekannt_, an affix very dreadful to young aspirants for university honours.

As regards the men who, during the past seventy-five years have so greatly widened our scientific knowledge, I have had contact with those of Germany only for brief periods, and in the outer circle. As to their American brethren, fate has been more kind to me. I have sat as a pupil at the feet of the most eminent, and with some I have stood in the bond of friends.h.i.+p.

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