Part 6 (2/2)

George H. Boker had a great influence on me. We were in a way connected, for my uncle Amos had married his aunt, and my cousin, Benjamin G.o.dfrey, his cousin. He was exactly six feet high, with the form of an Apollo, and a head which was the very counterpart of the bust of Byron. A few years later N. P. Willis described him in the _Home Journal_ as the handsomest man in America. He had been from boyhood as precociously a man of the world as I was the opposite. He was _par eminence_ the poet of our college, and in a quiet, gentlemanly way its ”swell.” I pa.s.sed a great deal of my time in his rooms reading Wordsworth, Sh.e.l.ley, and Byron, the last named being his ideal. He ridiculed the Lakers, whom I loved; and when Southey's last poem, ”On Gooseberry Pie,” appeared, he declared that the poor old man was in his dotage, to which I a.s.sented with sorrow in my heart. Though only one year older than I, yet, as a _Junior_, and from his superior knowledge of life, I regarded him as being about thirty. He was quite familiar, in a refined and gentlemanly way, with all the dissipation of Philadelphia and New York; nor was the small circle of his friends, with whom I habitually a.s.sociated, much behind him in this respect. Even during this Junior year he was offered the post of secretary to our Amba.s.sador at Vienna. From him and the others I acquired a second-hand knowledge of life, which was sufficient to keep me from being regarded as a duffer or utterly ”green,” though in all such ”life” I was practically as innocent as a young nun. Now, whatever I heard, as well as read, I always turned over and over in my mind, thoroughly digesting it to a most exceptional degree. So that I was somewhat like the young lady of whom I heard in Vienna in after years. She was brought up in the utmost moral and strict seclusion, but she found in her room an aperture through which she could witness all that took place in the neighbouring room of a _maison de pa.s.se_; but being a great philosopher, she in time regarded it all as the ”b.u.t.terfly pa.s.sing show” of a theatre, the mere idle play of foolish mortal pa.s.sions.

Even before I began my Freshman year there came into my life a slight but new and valuable influence. Professor Dodd, when I arrived, had just begun his course of lectures on architecture. To my great astonishment, but not at all to that of George Boker, I was invited to attend the course, Boker remarking dryly that he had no doubt that Dodd thanked G.o.d for having at last got an auditor who would appreciate him. Which I certainly did. I in after years listened to the great Thiersch, who trained Heine to art, and of whom I was a special _protege_, and many great teachers, but I never listened to any one like Albert Dodd. It was not with him the mere description of styles and dates; it was a deep and truly aesthetic feeling that every phase of architecture mirrors and reciprocally forms its age, and breathes its life and poetry and religion, which characterised all that he said. It was in nothing like the subjective rhapsodies of Ruskin, which bloomed out eight years later, but rather in the spirit of Vischer and Taine, which J. A. Symonds has so beautifully and clearly set forth in his Essays {98}--that is, the spirit of historical development. Here my German philosophy enabled me to grasp a subtle and delicate spirit of beauty, which pa.s.sed, I fear, over the heads of the rest of the youthful audience. His ideas of the correspondence of Egyptian architecture to the stupendous ma.s.siveness of Pantheism and the appalling grandeur of its ideas, were clear enough to me, who had copied Hermes Trismegistus and read with deepest feeling the Orphic and Chaldean oracles. The ideas had not only been long familiar to me, but formed my very life and the subject of the most pa.s.sionate study. To hear them clearly expressed with rare beauty, in the deep, strange voice of the professor, was joy beyond belief. And as it would not be in human nature for a lecturer not to note an admiring auditor, it happened often enough that something was often introduced for my special appreciation.

For I may here note--and it was a very natural thing--that just as Gypsy musicians always select in the audience some one who seems to be most appreciative, at whom they play (they call it _de o kan_), so Professors Dodd and James Alexander afterwards, in their aesthetic, or more erudite disquisitions, rarely failed to fiddle at me--Dodd looking right in my eyes, and Alexander at the ceiling, ending, however, with a very brief glance, as if for conscience' sake. I feel proud of this, and it affects me more now than it did then, when it produced no effect of vanity, and seemed to me to be perfectly natural.

I heard certain mutterings and hoots among the students as I went out of the lecture-room, but did not know what it meant. George Boker informed me afterwards that there had been great indignation expressed that ”a green ignorant Freshman” had dared to intrude, as I had done, among his intellectual superiors and betters, but that he had at once explained that I was a great friend of Professor Dodd, and a kind of marvellous _rara avis_, not to be cla.s.sed with common little Freshmen; so that in future I was allowed to go my way in peace.

A man of culture who had known Coleridge well, declared that as a conversationalist on varied topics Professor Albert Dodd was his superior. When in the pulpit, or in the lengthened ”addresses” of lecturing, there was a marvellous fascination in his voice--an Italian witch, or red Indian, or a gypsy would have at once recognised in him a sorcerer. Yet his manner was subdued, his voice monotonous, never loud, a running stream without babbling stones or rapids; but when it came to a climax cataract he cleared it with grandeur, leaving a stupendous impression. In the ordinary monotony of that deep voice there was soon felt an indescribable charm. In saying this I only repeat what I have heard in more or less different phrase from others. There was always in his eyes (and in this as in other points he resembled Emerson) a strange indefinable suspicion of a smile, though he, like the Sage of Concord, rarely laughed. Owing to these black eyes, and his sallow complexion, his sobriquet among the students was ”the royal Bengal tiger.” He was not unlike Emerson as a lecturer. I heard the latter deliver his great course of lectures in London in 1848--including the famous one on Napoleon--but he had not to the same perfection the music of the voice, nor the indefinable mysterious charm which characterised the style of Professor Dodd, who played with emotion as if while feeling he was ever superior to it. He was a great actor, who had gone far beyond acting or art.

Owing, I suppose, to business losses, my father and family lived for two years either at Congress Hall Hotel or _en pension_. I spent my first vacation at the former place. There lived in the house a Colonel John Du Solle, the editor of a newspaper. He was a good-natured, rather dissipated man, who kept horses and had a fancy for me, and took me out ”on drives,” and once introduced me in the street to a great actress, Susan Cushman, {101} and very often to theatres and coffee-houses and reporters, and printed several of my lucubrations. Du Solle was in after years secretary to P. T. Barnum, whom I also knew well. He was kind to me, and I owe him this friendly mention. Some people thought him a rather dangerous companion for youth, but I was never taken by him into bad company or places, nor did I ever hear from him a word of which my parents would have disapproved. But I really believe that I could at that time, or any other, have kept company with the devil and not been much harmed: it was not in me. Edgar A. Poe was often in Du Solle's office and at Congress Hall.

In the summer we all went to Stonington, Connecticut, where we lived at a hotel called the Wadawanuc House. There I went out sailing--once on a clam-bake excursion in a yacht owned by Captain Nat. Palmer, who had discovered Palmer's Land--and sailed far and wide. That summer I also saw on his own deck the original old Vanderbilt himself, who was then the captain of a Sound steamboat; and I bathed every day in salt-water, and fished from the wharf, and smoked a great deal, and read French books; and after a while we went into Ma.s.sachusetts and visited the dear old villages and Boston, and so on, till I had to return to Princeton. Soon after my father took another house in Walnut Street, the next door above the one where we had lived. This one was rather better, for though it had less garden, it had larger back-buildings.

_Bon an_, _mal an_, the time pa.s.sed away at Princeton for four years. I was often very ill. In the last year the physician who tested my lungs declared they were unsound in two places; and about this time I was believed to have contracted an incurable stoop in the shoulders. One day I resolved that from _that minute_ I would always hold myself straight upright; and I did so, and in the course of time became as straight as an arrow, and have continued so, I believe, ever since.

I discovered vast treasures of strange reading in the library of the Princeton Theological College. There was in one corner in a waste-room at least two cart-loads of old books in a cobwebbed dusty pile. Out of that pile I raked the _thirteenth_ known copy of Blind Harry's famed poem, a black-letter Euphues Lely, an _Erra Pater_ (a very weak-minded friend _actually shamed_ me out of making a copy of this great curiosity, telling me it was silly and childish of me to be so pleased with old trash), and many more marvels, which were so little esteemed in Princeton, that one of the professors, seeing me daft with delight over my finds, told me I was quite welcome to keep them all; but I, who better knew their _great_ value, would not avail myself of the offer, reflecting that a time would come when these treasures would be properly valued. G.o.d knows it was a _terrible_ temptation to me, and such as I hope I may never have again--_ne inducas nos in temptationem_!

The time for my graduation was at hand. I had profited very much in the last year by the teaching and friendly counsel of Professor Joseph Henry, whose lectures on philosophy I diligently attended; also those on geology, chemistry and botany by Professor Torrey, and by the company of Professor Topping. I stood very high in Latin, and perhaps first in English branches. Yet, because I had fallen utterly short in mathematics, I was rated the lowest but one in the cla.s.s--or, honestly speaking, the very last, for the one below me was an utterly reckless youth, who could hardly be said to have studied or graduated at all.

There were two honours usually awarded for proficiency in study. One was the First Honour, and he who received it delivered the Valedictory Oration; the second was the Poem; and by an excess of kindness and justice for which I can never feel too grateful, and which was really an extraordinary stretch of their power under the circ.u.mstances, the Poem was awarded to me!

I was overwhelmed at the honour, but bitterly mortified and cut to my heart to think how little I had deserved it; for I had never done a thing save read and study that which pleased me and was _easy_. I wrote the poem (and I still think it was a good one, for I put all my soul into it), and sent it in to the Faculty, with a letter stating that I was deeply grateful for their extreme kindness, but that, feeling I had not deserved it, I must decline the honour. But I sent them my MS. as a proof that I did not do so because I felt myself incapable, and because I wished to give them some evidence that they had not erred in regarding me as a poet.

Very foolish and boyish, the reader may say, and yet I never regretted it. The Faculty were not to blame for the system pursued, and they did their utmost in every way for four years to make it easy and happy for one of the laziest and most objectionable students whom they had ever had. I have never been really able to decide whether I was right or wrong. At liberal Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, neither I nor the professors would ever have discovered a flaw in my industry. At the closely cramped, orthodox, hide-bound, mathematical Princeton, every weakness in me seemed to be developed. Thirty years later I read in the _Na.s.sau Monthly_, which I had once edited, that if Boker and I and a few others had become known in literature, we had done so _in spite of_ our education there. I do not know who wrote it; whoever he was, I am much obliged to him for a very comforting word. For, discipline apart, it was literally ”in spite of our education” that we learned anything worth knowing at Princeton--as it then was.

From this point a new phase of life begins. Prominent in it and as its moving power was the great kindness of my father. That I had graduated at all under any conditions was gratifying, and so was the fact that it was not in reality without the so-called Second Honour, despite my low grade. And the pitiable condition of my health was considered. During the last year I had taken lessons in dancing and fencing, which helped me a little, and I looked as if I might become strong with a change of life.

So my father took my mother and me on a grand excursion. We went to Stonington, New York, and Saratoga, where I attended a ball--my first--and then on to Niagara. On the way we stopped at Auburn, where there was a great State-prison, which I visited alone. There was among its attractions a noted murderer under sentence of death. There were two or three ladies and gentlemen who were shown by the warder with me over the building. He expressed some apprehension as to showing us the murderer, for he was a very desperate character. We entered a large room, and I saw a really gentlemanly-looking man heavily ironed, who was reading a newspaper. While the others conversed with him, I endeavoured to make un.o.bserved a sketch of his face. The warder noticing this, called me to the front to make it boldly, and the prisoner, smiling, told me to go on with it; which I did, and that not so badly--at least, the sitter approved of it.

So we went up the beautiful Hudson, which far surpa.s.ses the Rhine, and yields the palm only to the Danube, stopping at Poughkeepsie and Albany, and so on to Niagara Falls. On the way we pa.s.sed through a burning forest. My awe at this wonderful sight amused some one present to whom it was a familiar thing. Which reminds me that about the time when I first went to college, but while staying at Congress Hall, I there met a youth from Alabama or Mississippi, who was on his way to Princeton to join our ranks. To him I of course showed every attention, and by way of promoting his happiness took him to the top of the belfry of the State House, whence there is a fine view. While there I casually remarked what a number of s.h.i.+ps there were in the river, whereupon he eagerly cried, ”Oh, show me one! I never saw a s.h.i.+p in all my life!” I gazed at him in utter astonishment, as if I would say, ”What manner of man art thou?” and then recalling myself, said, ”Well, we are just equal, for you never saw a s.h.i.+p, and I never saw a _cotton-field_.” The young man smiled incredulously, and replied, ”Now I know that you are trying to humbug me, for how _could_ you grow up without ever seeing cotton-fields?”

We arrived at Niagara about noon, and I at once went to see the Falls.

There was a very respectable-looking old gentleman, evidently from the far South, with two young ladies, one a great beauty, advancing just before. I heard him say, ”Now, keep your eyes closed, or look down till you can have a full view.” I did the same, and when he cried ”Look up!”

did so. It was one of the great instants of my life.

I know not how it was, but that first glance suggested to me something _chivalric_. It may have been from Byron's simile of the tail of the white horse and the cataract, and the snow-white steed of that incarnation of n.o.bility, Crescentius, and there rang in my memory a mystical verse--

”My eye bears a glance like the gleam of a lance When I hear the waters dash and dance; And I smile with glee, for I love to see The sight of anything that's free!”

But it was a mingled sense of n.o.bility, and above all of _freedom_, which impressed me in that roaring mist of waters, in the wild river leaping as in reckless sport over the vast broad precipice. It is usual, especially for those who have no gift of description, to say that Niagara is ”utterly indescribable,” and the Visitors' Book has this opinion repeated by the American Philistine on every page. But that is because those who say so have no proper comprehension of facts stated, no poetic faculty, and no imagination. Of course no mere description, however perfect, would give the same conception of even a pen or a b.u.t.ton as would the _sight_ thereof; but it is absurd and illogical to speak as if this were _peculiar_ to a great thing alone. For my part, I believe that the mere description to a _poet_, or to one who has dwelt by wood and wold and steeped his soul in Nature, of a tremendous cataract a mile in breadth and two hundred feet high, cleft by a wooded island, and rus.h.i.+ng onward below in awful rocky rapids with a mighty roar, would, could, or should convey a very good idea of the great sight. For I found in after years, when I came to see Venice and the temples on the Nile, that they were picturesquely or practically precisely what I had expected to see, not one shade or _nuance_ of an expression more or less. As regards Rome and all Gothic cathedrals, I had been a.s.sured so often, or so generally, by all ”intelligent tourists,” that they were all wretched rubbish, that I was amazed to find them so beautiful. And so much as to antic.i.p.ations of Niagara, which I have thrice visited, and the constant a.s.sertion by cads unutterable that it is ”indescribable.”

While at Niagara for three days, I walked about a great deal with a young lady whose acquaintance we had made at the hotel. As she was, I verily believe, the very first, not a relative, with whom I had ever taken a walk, or, I may almost say, formed an acquaintance, it const.i.tuted an event in my life equal to Niagara itself in importance. I was at this time just twenty-one, and certain I am that among twenty-one thousand college graduates of my age in America, of the same condition of life, there was not another so inexperienced in worldly ways, or so far behind his age, or so ”docile unto discipline.” I was, in fact, morally where most boys in the United States are at twelve or thirteen; which is a very great mistake where there is a fixed determination that the youth shall make his own way in life. We cannot have boys good little angels at home and devils in business abroad.--_Horum utrum magis velim_, _mihi incertum est_.

III. UNIVERSITY LIFE AND TRAVEL IN EUROPE. 1845-1848.

Pa.s.sage in a sailing s.h.i.+p--Gibraltar--Ma.r.s.eilles--Smugglers and a slaver--Italy--Life in Rome--Torlonia's b.a.l.l.s and the last great Carnival of 1846--Navone, the chief of police--Florence--Venice--How I pa.s.sed the Bridge of Sighs--The Black Bait--Slavery--Crossing the Simplon--Switzerland--Pleasing introduction to Germany--Student life at Heidelberg--Captain Medwin--Justinus Kerner--How I saw Jenny Lind--Munich--Lola Montez--Our house on fire--All over Germany--How I was turned out of Poland--Paris in 1847--The Revolution of 1848--I become conspirator and captain of barricades--Taking of the Tuileries--The police bow me out of Prance--A season in London--Return to America.

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