Title : The Last Leaf
Author : James Kendall Hosmer
Release date
: May 1, 2004 [eBook #12429]
Most recently updated: December 14, 2020
Language : English
Credits : Produced by Ted Garvin, Bill Hershey and PG Distributed Proofreaders
Produced by Ted Garvin, Bill Hershey and PG Distributed Proofreaders
The Last Leaf
Observations, during Seventy-five Years, of Men and Events in America and Europe
By
James Kendall Hosmer, LL.D.
Member of the Minnesota Historical Society, Corresponding Member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts
Author of "A Short History of German Literature," "The Story of the Jews," the Lives of Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Sir Henry Vane, etc.
1912
Standing on the threshold of my eightieth year, stumbling badly, moreover, through the mutiny, well justified, of a pair of worn-out eyes, I, a veteran maker of books, must look forward to the closing of an over-long series.
I retain in my memory certain films, which record impressions of long ago. Can I not possibly develop and present these film records for a moving picture of the men and events of an eventful period?
We old story-tellers do our talking under a heavy handicap. Homer, long ago, found us garrulous, and compared us to cicadas chirping unprofitably in the city-gate. In the modern time, too, Dr. Holmes, ensconced in smug youth, could "sit and grin" at one of our kind as he
"Totters o'er the ground
With his cane."
He thought
"His breeches and all that
Were so queer."
The "all that" is significant. To the callow young doctor, men of our kind were throughout queered, and so, too, think the spruce and jaunty company who are shouldering us so fast out of the front place. In their thought we are more than depositors of last leaves, in fact we are last leaves ourselves, capable in the green possibly of a pleasant murmur, but in the dry with no voice but a rattle prophetic of winter. I hope Dr. Holmes lived to repent his grin. At any rate he lived to refute the notion that youthful fire and white hairs exclude each other. If we must totter, what ground we have to totter over, with two generations and more behind us! The ground is ours. We only have looked into the faces of the great actors, and have taken part in the epoch-making events. As I unroll my panorama I may totter, but I hope I shall not dodder.
Retiring, as I must soon do from my somewhat Satanic activity, from "going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down in it," I can claim, like my ill-reputed exemplar, to have encountered some patient Jobs, servants of the Lord, but more who were impatient, yet not the less the Lord's servants, and the outward semblance of these I try to present. My pictures have to some extent been exhibited before, in the Atlantic Monthly , the New York Evening Post , and the Boston Transcript , and I am indebted to the courtesy of the publishers of these periodicals for permission to utilise them here. I am emboldened by the favour they met to present them again to the public, retouched, and expanded. I attempt no elaborate characterisation of men, or history of events or exposition of philosophies. My films are snap-shots, caught from the curbstone, from the gallery of an assembly, in a scholar's study, or by the light of a camp-fire. I have ventured to address my reader as friend might talk to a friend, with the freedom of familiar intercourse, and I hope that the reader may not be conscious of any undue intrusion of the showman as the figures and scenes appear. Go, little book, with this setting forth of what you are and aim to do.
MINNEAPOLIS, October, 4, 1912.
"Tippecanoe and Tyler too." Millard Fillmore. Abraham Lincoln at
Church. Stephen A. Douglas. Daniel Webster. William H. Seward. Edward
Everett. Robert C. Winthrop. Charles Sumner. John A. Andrew.
U.S. Grant. Philip H. Sheridan. George G. Meade. W.T. Sherman. Jacob
D. Cox. N.P. Banks. B.F. Butler. John Pope. Henry W. Slocum. O.O.
Howard. Rufus Saxton. James H. Wilson. T.W. Sherman. Horatio G.
Wright. Isaac I. Stevens. Harvard Soldiers. W.F. Bartlett. Charles R.
Lowell. Francis C. Barlow.
Horace Mann. "The New Wrinkle at Sweetbrier." Dramatics in the Schools of Germany, of France, of England, at Antioch College.
Prussia in 1870. Militarism in the Schools, in the Universities, in the Home, in the Sepulchre. The Hohenzollern Lineage.
Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. The Emperor Frederick. Wilhelm II. Francis
Joseph of Austria. King Ludwig of Bavaria. Munich in War-time. A
Deserted Switzerland. France in Arms. Paris on the Verge of the Siege.
George Bancroft. Justin Winsor. John Fiske.
Sir Richard Garnett. S.R. Gardiner. E.A. Freeman. Goldwin Smith.
James Bryce. The House of Commons. Lord Randolph Churchill and W.E.
Gladstone as Makers of History. Von Treitschke. Ernst Curtius. Leopold
von Ranke. Theodor Mommsen. Lepsius. Hermann Grimm.
Henry W. Longfellow. Oliver Wendell Holmes. James Russell Lowell.
The Town of Concord. Henry D. Thoreau. Louisa M. Alcott. Nathaniel
Hawthorne. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Phillips Brooks.
German Scientists: Kirchoff, the Physicist. Bunsen, the Chemist.
Helmholtz. American Scientists: Simon Newcomb, Asa Gray, Louis
Agassiz, Alexander Agassiz.
William Grey, Ninth Earl of Stamford. The Franciscan of Salzburg. The
Berlin Dancer. Visits to Old Battle-fields. Eupeptic Musings.
The Last Leaf
I came to consciousness in the then small town of Buffalo in western New York, whither, in Andrew Jackson's day, our household gods and goods were conveyed from Massachusetts for the most part by the Erie Canal, the dizzy rate of four miles an hour not taking away my baby breath. Speaking of men and affairs of state, as I shall do in this opening paper, I felt my earliest political thrill in 1840. I have a distinct vision, the small boy's point of view being not much above the sidewalk, of the striding legs in long processions, of wide-open, clamorous mouths above, and over all of the flutter of tassels and banners. Then began my knowledge of log-cabins, coon-skins, and of the name hard cider, the thump of drums, the crash of brass-bands, cockades, and torch-lights. My powers as a singer, always modest, I first exercised on "For Tippecanoe and Tyler too," which still obtrudes too obstinately upon my tympanum, though much fine harmony heard since in cathedrals and the high shrines of music is quite powerless now to make that organ vibrate. Four years later, my emerging voice did better justice to "Harry Clay of Old Kentucky," and my early teens found me in an environment that quickened prematurely my interest in public affairs. My father, the pioneer apostle of an unpopular faith, ministered in a small church of brick faced with stone to a congregation which, though few in numbers, contained some remarkable people. Millard Fillmore and his partner, Nathan K. Hall, soon to be Postmaster-General, were of his fold, together with Hiram Barton, the city's mayor, and other figures locally noteworthy. Fillmore was only an accidental President, dominated, no doubt, and dwarfed in the perspective by greater men, while the part he played in a great crisis brought upon him obloquy with many good people. "Say what you will about Fillmore," said a fellow-totterer to me the other day, adjusting his "store" teeth for an emphatic declaration, "by signing the Fugitive Slave Bill he saved the country. That act postponed the Civil War ten years. Had it come in 1850, as it assuredly would but for that scratch of Fillmore's pen, the Union would have gone by the board. The decade that followed greatly increased the relative strength of the North. A vast immigration poured in which almost universally came to stand for the Union. Moreover the expanding West, whose natural outlet until then had been down the Mississippi to the South, became now linked to the East by great lines of railroad, and West and East entered into such a new bond of sympathy that there was nothing for it, in a time of trial, but to stand together. As it was, it was only by the narrowest margin that the Union weathered the storm. Had it come ten years earlier, wreck would have been inevitable, and it is to Fillmore's signature that we owe that blessed postponement." As the old man spoke, I had a vision of the grave, troubled face of my father as he told us once of a talk he had just had with Mr. Fillmore. The relations of the pastor and the parishioner, always cordial, had become more than ever friendly through an incident creditable to both. Mr. Fillmore had good-naturedly offered my father a chaplaincy in the Navy, a post with a comfortable salary, which he might easily hold, taking now and then a pleasant sea-cruise with light duties, or indeed not leaving home at all, by occasional trips and visits to the one man-of-war which the Government maintained on the Great Lakes. To an impecunious minister, with a large family to educate, it was a tempting offer. But my father in those days was a peace-man, and he was also disinclined to nibble at the public crib while rendering no adequate service. He declined the appointment, a course much censured. "The fool parson, to let such a chance go!" Mr. Fillmore admired it and their friendship became heartier than ever. In the interview, my father had asked his friend to explain his course on the Fugitive Slave Law, an act involving suffering for so many, and no doubt took on a tone of remonstrance. He told us the President raised his hands in vehement appeal. He had only a choice between terrible evils—to inflict suffering which he hoped might be temporary, or to precipitate an era of bloodshed with the destruction of the country as a probable result. He did not do evil that good might come, but of two imminent evils he had, as he believed, chosen the lesser.
Fillmore lives in my memory a stately, massive presence, with hair growing grey and kindly blue eyes looking down upon the little boy with a pleasant greeting. His wife was gentle and unassuming. His daughter Abby matured into much beauty and grace, and her sudden death, by cholera, in the bloom of young womanhood cast a shadow on the nation. They were homely folk, thrust up suddenly into high position, but it did not turn their heads. In their lives they were plainly sweet and honest. No taint of corruption attaches to Fillmore in either his private or public career. He was my father's friend. I think he meant well, and am glad that our most authoritative historian of the period, Rhodes, can say that he discharged the duties of his high office "with ability and honour."
When in February, 1861, Abraham Lincoln, on his way to Washington, arrived in Buffalo Saturday night and it became known he would spend Sunday, the town was alive with curiosity as to where he would go to church. Mr. Lincoln was Mr. Fillmore's guest. They had known each other well in Congress—Fillmore a veteran at the head of the Committee of Ways and Means, Lincoln then quite unknown, serving his only term. Both were Whigs of the old school, in close contact and I suppose not afterwards far apart. Lincoln was prepared to execute the Fugitive Slave Law, while Fillmore was devoted to the Union, and probably would have admitted at the end that Lincoln's course throughout was good. My father's church was looked on somewhat askance. "It's lucky," said a parishioner once, "that it has a stone face." Would Lincoln go to the Unitarian church? Promptly at service-time Mr. Fillmore appeared with his guest, the two historic figures side by side in the pew. Two or three rows intervened between it and that in which sat my mother and our household. I beheld the scene only through the eyes of my kindred, for by that time I had flown the nest. But I may be pardoned for noting here an interesting spectacle. As they stood during the hymns, the contrast was picturesque. Both men had risen from the rudest conditions through much early hardship. Fillmore had been rocked in a sap-trough in a log-cabin scarcely better than Lincoln's early shelter, and the two might perhaps have played an even match at splitting rails. Fillmore, however, strangely adaptive, had taken on a marked grace of manner, his fine stature and mien carrying a dignified courtliness which is said to have won him a handsome compliment from Queen Victoria—a gentleman rotund, well-groomed, conspicuously elegant. Shoulder to shoulder with him rose the queer, raw-boned, ramshackle frame of the Illinoisan, draped in the artless handiwork of a prairie tailor, surmounted by the rugged, homely face. The service, which the new auditor followed reverently, being finished, the minister, leaving the pulpit, gave Lincoln God-speed—and so he passed on to his greatness. My mother, sister, and brothers—the youngest of whom before two years were gone was to fill a soldier's grave—stood close at hand.
I once saw Stephen A. Douglas, the man who was perhaps more closely associated than any other with the fame of Lincoln, for he was the human obstacle by overcoming whom Lincoln proved his fitness for the supreme place. Douglas was a man marvellously strong. Rhodes declares it would be hard to set bounds to his ability. I saw him in 1850, when he was yet on the threshold, just beginning to make upon the country an impress of power. Fillmore had recently, through Taylor's death, become President, and was making his first visit to his home after his elevation, with members of his Cabinet and other conspicuous figures of his party. How Douglas came to be of the company I wonder, for he was an ardent Jacksonian Democrat, but there he was on the platform before the multitude, and I, a boy of sixteen, watched him curiously, for he was young as compared with the grey heads about him. His image, as he stood up to speak, is very clear to me even now—a face strong-featured and ruddy with vigour beneath a massive forehead whose thatch had the blackness and luxuriance of youth. His trunk was disproportionately large, carried on legs sturdy enough but noticeably short. The wits used to describe him as the statesman "with coat-tails very near the ground." It is worth while to remark on this physical peculiarity because it was the direct opposite of Lincoln's configuration. He, while comparatively short-bodied, had, as all the world knows, an abnormal length of limb, a fact which I suppose will account for much of his ungainly manner. In an ordinary chair he was undoubtedly uncomfortable, and hence his familiar attitude with his feet on the table or over the mantelpiece. The two fought each other long and sternly on those memorable platforms in Illinois in 1858, and in their physique there must have been, as they stood side by side, a grotesque parody of their intellectual want of harmony. Douglas's usual sobriquet was "the little giant," and it fitted well—a man of stalwart proportions oddly "sawed off." His voice was vibrant and sonorous, his mien compelling. It was no great speech, a few sentences of compliment to the city and of good-natured banter of the political foes among whom he found himself; but it was ex pede Herculem , a leader red-blooded to the finger-tips. I treasure the memory of this brief touch into which I once came with Douglas for I have come to think more kindly of him as he has receded. Not a few will now admit that, taken generally, his doctrine of "squatter sovereignty" was right. Congress ought not to have power to fix a status for people of future generations. If a status so fixed becomes repugnant it will be repudiated, and rightfully. Douglas was certainly cool over the woes of the blacks; but he refused, it is said, to grow rich, when the opportunity offered, from the ownership of slaves or from the proceeds of their sale. His rally to the side of Lincoln at last was finely magnanimous and it was a pleasant scene, at the inauguration of March 4, 1861, when Douglas sat close by holding Lincoln's hat. There was an interview between the two men behind closed doors, on the night the news of Sumter came, of which one would like to have a report. Lincoln came out from it to issue, through the Associated Press, his call for troops, and Douglas to send by the same channel the appeal to his followers to stand by the Government. What could the administration have done without the faithful arms and hearts of the War Democrats? And what other voice but that of Douglas could have rallied them to its support? Had he lived it seems inevitable that the two so long rivals would have been close friends—that Douglas would have been in Lincoln's Cabinet, perhaps in Stanton's place. This, however, is not a memory but a might-have-been, and those are barred out in this Last Leaf.
Daniel Webster came home to die in 1852. He was plainly failing fast, but the State for which he stood hoped for the best, and arranged that he should speak, as so often before, in Faneuil Hall. As I walked in from Harvard College, over the long "caterpillar bridge" through Cambridge Street and Dock Square, my freshman mind was greatly perplexed. My mother's family were perfervid Abolitionists, accepting the extremest utterances of Garrison and Wendell Phillips. I was now in that environment, and felt strong impress from the power and sincerity of the anti-slavery leaders. Fillmore and his Postmaster-General, N.K. Hall, were old family friends. We children had chummed with their children. Their kindly, honest faces were among the best known to us in the circle of our elders. I had learned to respect no men more. I was about to behold Webster, Fillmore's chief secretary and counsellor. On the one hand he was much denounced, on the other adored, in each case with fiery vehemence, and in my little world the contrasting passions were wildly ablaze. In the mass that crowded Faneuil Hall we waited long, an interval partly filled by the eccentric and eloquent Father Taylor, the seamen's preacher, whom the crowd espied in the gallery and summoned clamorously. My mood was serious, and it jarred upon me when a classmate, building on current rumours, speculated irreverently as to the probable contents of the pitcher on Mr. Webster's desk. He came at last, tumultuously accompanied and received, and advanced to the front, his large frame, if I remember right, dressed in the blue coat with brass buttons and buff vest usual to him on public occasions, which hung loosely about the attenuated limbs and body. The face had all the majesty I expected, the dome above, the deep eyes looking from the caverns, the strong nose and chin, but it was the front of a dying lion. His colour was heavily sallow, and he walked with a slow, uncertain step. His low, deep intonations conveyed a solemn suggestion of the sepulchre. His speech was brief, a recognition of the honour shown him, an expression of his belief that the policy he had advocated and followed was necessary to the country's preservation. Then he passed out to Marshfield and the death-bed. What he said was not much, but it made a strange impression of power, and here I am minded to tell an ancient story. Sixty years ago, when I was ensconced in my smug youth, and could "sit and grin," like young Dr. Holmes, at the queernesses of the last leaves of those days, I heard a totterer whose ground was the early decades of the last century, chirp as follows:
"This Daniel Webster of yours! Why, I can remember when he had a hard push to have his ability acknowledged. We used to aver that he never said anything, and that it was only his big way that carried the crowd. I have in mind an old-time report of one of his deliverances: 'Mr. Chairman ( applause ), I did not graduate at this university ( greater applause ), at this college ( tumultuous applause ), I graduated at another college ( wild cheering with hats thrown in the air ), I graduated at a college of my native State ( convulsions of enthusiasm, during which the police spread mattresses to catch those who leaped from the windows ).'"
That day in Faneuil Hall I felt his "big way" and it overpowered, though the sentences were really few and commonplace. What must he have been in his prime! What sentences in the whole history of oratory have more swayed men than those he uttered! I recall that in 1861 we young men of the North did not much argue the question of the right of secession. The Constitution was obscure about it, and one easily became befogged if he sought to weigh the right and the wrong of it. But Webster had replied to Hayne. Those were the days when schoolboys "spoke pieces," and in thousands of schoolhouses the favourite piece was his matchless peroration. From its opening, "When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in the heavens," to the final outburst, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!" it was all as familiar to us as the sentences of the Lord's Prayer, and scarcely less consecrated. No logical unravelling of the tangle, but that burning expression of devotion to the Union, lay behind the enthusiasm with which we sprang to arms. The ghost of Webster hovered in the battle-smoke, and it was his call more than any other that rallied and kept us at the firing-line.
I think my mother told me once that on the canal-boat as we went West in the thirties, we had Webster for a time as a fellow-passenger, who good-naturedly patted the heads of the two little boys who then made up her brood. I wish I could be sure that the hand of Webster had once rested on my head. His early utterances as to slavery are warm with humane feeling. I have come to feel that his humanity did not cool, but he grew into the belief that agitation at the time would make sure the destruction of the country, in his eyes the supreme calamity. The injustice, hoary from antiquity, not recognised as injustice until within a generation or two, might wait a generation or two longer before we dealt with it. Let the evil be endured a while that the greater evil might not come. I neither defend nor denounce him. I am now only remembering; and what a stately and solemn image it is to remember!
* * * * *
William H. Seward, unlike Webster, had the handicap of an unimpressive exterior, nor had his voice the profound and conquering note which is so potent an ally of the mind in subduing men. I heard Seward's oration at Plymouth in 1855, a worthy effort which may be read in his works, but I do better here to pick up only the straws, not meddling with the heavy-garnered wheat. I recall an inconspicuous figure, of ordinary stature, and a face whose marked feature was the large nose (Emerson called it "corvine"), but that, as some one has said, is the hook which nature makes salient in the case of men whom fortune is to drag forward into leadership. He spoke in the pulpit of my grandfather, who at the time had been for nearly sixty years minister of the old Pilgrim parish. From that coign of vantage, my faithful grandsire had no doubt smoked out many a sinner, and had not been sparing of the due polemic fulminations in times of controversy. The old theology, too, had undergone at his hands faithful fumigation to make it sanitary for the modern generations. From one kind of smoke, however, that venerable pulpit had been free until the hour of Seward's arrival. It arched my eyebrows well when I saw him at the end of his address light a cigar in the very shrine, a burnt-offering, in my good grandfather's eyes certainly, more fitting for altars satanic. My grandfather promptly called him down, great man though he was, a rub which the statesman received from the white-haired minister, good-naturedly postponing his smoke. But Seward rode rough-shod too often over conventions, and sometimes over real proprieties. In an over-convivial frame once, his tongue, loosened by champagne, nearly wagged us into international complications, and there is a war-time anecdote, which I have never seen in print and I believe is unhackneyed, which casts a light. A general of the army, talking with Lincoln and the Cabinet, did not spare his oaths. "What church do you attend?" interposed the President at last, stroking his chin in his innocent way. Confused at an inquiry so foreign to the topic under discussion, the soldier replied he did not attend much of any church himself, but his folks were Methodists. "How odd!" said. Lincoln, "I thought you were an Episcopalian. You swear just like Seward, and Seward is an Episcopalian."
But I should be sorry to believe there was any trouble with Seward but a surface blemish. Though in '61 he advocated a foreign war as a means for bringing together North and South, and desired to shelve practically Lincoln while he himself stood at the front to manage the turmoil, he made no more mistakes than statesmen in general. He had been powerful for good before the war, and during its course, with what virile stiffness of the upper lip did he face and foil the frowning foreign world! He had the insight and candour to do full justice at last to Lincoln, whom at first he depreciated. Then the purchase of Alaska! Writing as I do on the western coast I am perhaps affected by the glamour of that marvellous land. When news of the bargain came in the seventies, the scorners sang:
"Hear it all ye polar bears,
Waltz around the pole in pairs.
All ye icebergs make salaam,
You belong to Uncle Sam.
Lo, upon the snow too plain
Falls his dark tobacco stain."
We thought that very funny and very apt,—but now! I am glad I have his image vivid, in the pulpit beside my grandfather scratching a match for a too careless cigar. Between smokes he had done, and was still to do, some fine things.
* * * * *
In those days, Edward Everett and Robert C. Winthrop were often under my immature gaze. Men much alike in views, endowments, and accomplishments, they had played out their parts in public life and had been consigned to their Boston shelf. In the perspective they are statuettes rather than statues, of Parian spotlessness, ribboned and gilt-edged through an elegant culture, well appointed according to the best taste, companion Sévres pieces, highly ornamental, and effectually shelved. By the side of the robust protagonists of those stormy years they stand as figurines, not figures, and yet it was rather through their fate than through their fault perhaps that they are what they are in our Pantheon. They were not at all without virile quality. Everett bore himself well in some rough Senatorial debates, and Winthrop, as Speaker of the House at Washington, was in stormy times an able and respected officer. But coarse contacts jarred upon their refinement; and when, like the public men in general who saw in postponement of the slavery agitation the wiser course, they were retired from the front, it is easy to see why the world judged them as it did. Everett's son, Mr. Sidney Everett, at one time Assistant Secretary of State, was my classmate, and honoured me once with a request to edit his father's works. I declined the task, but not from the feeling that the task was not worth doing. Everett had the idea that the armed rush of the North and South against each other might be stayed even at the last, by reviving in them the veneration for Washington, a sentiment shared by both. The delivery of his oration on Washington as a means to that end was well meant, but pathetic in its complete futility to accomplish such a purpose. So small a spill of oil upon a sea so raging! He was a master of beautiful periods, and I desire here to record my testimony that he also possessed a power for off-hand speech. The tradition is that his utterances were all elaborately studied, down to the gestures and the play of the features. I have heard him talk on the spur of the moment, starting out from an incident close at hand and touching effectively upon circumstances that arose as he proceeded.
Of the two men, often seen side by side, so similar in tastes, education, and character, both for the same cause ostracised from public life by their common wealth, a repugnance to reform which scouted all counting of costs, Winthrop impressed me in my young days as being the abler. His public career closed early, but he had time to show he could be vigorous and finely eloquent. I remember him most vividly as I saw him presiding at a Commencement dinner, a function which he discharged with extraordinary felicity. He had an alertness, as he stood lithe and graceful, derived perhaps from his strain of Huguenot blood. His wit was excelling, his learning comprehensive and well in hand. He was no more weighed down by his erudition than was David by his sling. Encomium, challenge, repartee,—all were quick and happy, and from time to time in soberer vein he passed over without shock into befitting dignity. I have sat at many a banquet, but for me that ruling of the feast by Winthrop is the masterpiece in that kind. He lived long after retiring from politics, the main stay of causes charitable, educational, and for civic betterment. My memory is enriched by the image of him which it holds.
* * * * *
Sixty years ago, one met, under the elms of the streets of Cambridge, two men who plainly were close friends: one of moderate height, well groomed in those days almost to the point of being dapper, very courteous, bowing low to every student he met, Henry W. Longfellow. Of him I shall have something to say later on. The other was a man of unusual stature and stalwart frame, with a face and head of marked power. His rich brown hair lay in heavy locks; the features were patrician. He would have been handsome but for an hauteur about the eyes not quite agreeable. His presence was commanding, not genial. It was Charles Sumner.
I often encountered the two men in those days, receiving regularly the poet's sunny recognition and the statesman's rather unsympathetic stare. Both men were overwhelmingly famous, but, touched simultaneously by warmth and frost, I, a shy youngster, could keep my balance in their presence. Sumner in those years was the especial bête noire of the South and the conservative North, and the idol of the radicals—at once the most banned and the most blessed of men. I had, besides, a personal reason for looking upon him with interest. He was a man with whom my father had once had a sharp difference, and I wondered, as I watched the stride of the stately Senator down the street, if he remembered, as my father did, that difference of twenty-five years before.
My father, in the late twenties a divinity student at Harvard, was a proctor, living in an entry of Stoughton Hall, for the good order of which he was expected to care. The only man he ever reported was Charles Sumner, and this was my father's story.
Sumner, an undergraduate, though still a boy, had nearly attained his full stature and weight. He was athletic in his tastes, and given to riding the velocipede of those days, a heavy, bonebreaking machine, moved not by pedals but by thrusting the feet against the ground. This Sumner kept in his room, carrying it painfully up the stairs, and practised on it with the result, his size and energy being so unusual, that the building, solid as it was, was fairly shaken, to the detriment of plaster and woodwork, and the complete wreck of the proper quiet of the place. My father remonstrated mildly, but without effect. A second more emphatic remonstrance was still without effect, whereupon came an ultimatum. If the disturbance continued, the offender would be reported to the college authorities.
The bone-breaker crashed on and the stroke fell. Sumner was called up before President Kirkland and received a reprimand. He came from the faculty-room to the proctor's apartment in a very boyish fit of tears, complaining between sobs that he was the victim of injustice, and upbraiding the proctor. My father was short with him; he had brought it upon himself, the penalty was only reasonable, and it would be manly for him to take it good-naturedly. Long afterward, when Sumner rose into great fame, my father remembered the incident perhaps too vividly.
My curiosity as to whether Mr. Sumner had any rankling in his heart from that old difference was at length gratified. The years passed, the assault in the Senate Chamber by Brooks roused the whole country; then came the time of slow recovery. Sumner had come back from the hands of Dr. Brown-Séquard at Paris to Boston, and was mustering strength to resume his great place. Calling one day on a friend in Somerset Street, I found a visitor in the parlour, a powerful man weighed down by physical disability, whom I recognised as the sufferer whose name at the moment was uppermost in millions of hearts.
As he heard my name in the introduction which followed my entrance, he said quickly, while shaking my hand, "I wonder if you are the son of the man who reported me in college." The tone was not quite genial. The old difference was not quite effaced. I told him as sturdily as I could that I was the son of his old proctor and that I had often heard my father tell the story. He said plainly he thought it unnecessary and unfair, and that that was the only time since his childhood when he had received a formal censure. Long after, he received censure from the Massachusetts Legislature for an act greatly to his credit, the suggestion that the captured battle-flags should be returned to the Southern regiments from which they had been taken.
But it was only a momentary flash. He settled back into the easy-chair with invalid languor, and began to tell me good-naturedly about his old velocipede, describing its construction, and the feats he had been able to perform on it, clumsy though it was. He could keep up with a fast horse in riding into Boston, but at the cost of a good pair of shoes. The contrivance supported the weight of the body, which rolled forward on the wheels, leaving the legs free to speed the machine by alternate rapid kicks. From that he branched off into college athletics of his day in a pleasant fashion, and at the end of the not short interview I felt I had enjoyed a great privilege.
Another contact with Charles Sumner was a rather memorable one. We were in the second year of the Civil War. He was in his high place, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the Senate, a main pillar of the Northern cause. I meantime had been ordained as minister of a parish in the Connecticut valley, and was a zealous upholder of the cause of the Union. John A. Andrew was Governor of Massachusetts. I had come to know him through having preached in the church at Hingham with which he was connected. He was superintendent of the Sunday-school, and had introduced me once for an address to his charge. We were theologically in sympathy, but for me it was a closer bond that he was the great war Governor.
At an Amherst commencement we had talked about recruiting in the Connecticut valley, and he had impressed me much. Short in stature, square, well-set in frame, he had a strong head and face. His colour was white and pink almost like that of a boy, and the resolute blue eyes looked out from under an abundant mat of light curling hair that confirmed the impression he made of youth. Not many months before, he had been the target of much ridicule, being held over-anxious about a coming storm. He had bought three thousand overcoats for the militia, and otherwise busied himself to have soldiers ready. He was "our merry Andrew." But the Massachusetts Sixth had been first on the ground at Washington, with many more close behind, and the Governor had had splendid vindication.
Early in September, 1862, I went to Boston with a deputation of selectmen from four towns of the Connecticut valley. They had an errand, and my function was, as an acquaintance of the Governor, to introduce them. Little we knew of what had just happened in Virginia, the dreadful second Bull Run campaign, with the driving in upon Washington of the routed Pope, and the pending invasion of Maryland. The despatches, while not concealing disappointment, told an over-flattering tale. More troops were wanted for a speedy finishing of the war, which we fondly believed was, in spite of all, nearing its end. Our errand was to ask that in a regiment about to be raised in two western counties the men might have the privilege of electing the officers, a pernicious practice which had been in vogue, and always done much harm. But in those days our eyes were not open.
Entering the Governor's room in the State House with my farmer selectmen, I found it densely thronged. Among the civilians were many uniforms, and men of note in the field and out stood there in waiting. Charles Sumner presently entered the room, dominating the company by his commanding presence, that day apparently in full vigour, alert, forceful, with a step before which the crowd gave way, his masterfulness fully recognised and acknowledged. He took his seat with the air of a prince of the blood at the table, close at hand to the Chief Magistrate.
Naturally abashed, but feeling I was in for a task which must be pushed through, I made my way to the other elbow of the Governor, who, looking up from his documents, recognised me politely and asked what I wanted. I stated our case, that a deputation from Franklin and Hampshire counties desired the privilege for the men of the new regiment about to be raised to elect their own officers, and not be commanded by men whom they did not know.
"Where are your selectmen?" said Governor Andrew, rising and pushing back his chair with an energy which I thought ominous. My companions had taken up a modest position in a far corner. When I pointed them out, the Governor made no pause, but proceeded to pour upon them and me a torrent of impassioned words. He said that we were making trouble, that the country was in peril, and that while he was trying to send every available man to the front in condition to do effective work he was embarrassed at home by petty interference with his efforts. "I have at hand soldiers who have proved themselves brave in action, have been baptised in blood and fire. They are fit through character and experience to be leaders, and yet I cannot give them commissions because I am blocked by this small and unworthy spirit of hindrance."
For some minutes the warm outburst went on. The white, beardless face flushed up under the curls, and his hands waved in rapid gesture. "A capital speech, your Excellency," cried out Sumner, "a most capital speech!" and he led the way in a peal of applause in which the crowd in the chamber universally joined, and which must have rung across Beacon Street to the Common far away. My feeble finger had touched the button which brought this unexpected downpour, and for the moment I was unpleasantly in the limelight.
"Now introduce me to your selectmen," said Governor Andrew, stepping to my side. I led the way to the corner to which the delegation had retreated, and presented my friends in turn. His manner changed. He was polite and friendly, and when, after a hand-shaking, he went back to his table, we felt we had not understood the situation and that our petition should have been withheld. For my part, I enlisted at once as a private and went into a strenuous campaign.
Sumner was intrepid, high-purposed, and accomplished, but what is the world saying now of his judgment? His recent friendly but discriminating biographer, Prof. George H. Haynes, declares that even in matters of taste he was at fault. The paintings he thought masterpieces, his gift to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, are for the most part consigned to the lumber-room. In sculpture his judgment was not better. As to literary art, his writing was ponderous and over-weighted with far-fetched allusion. The world felt horror at the attack of Brooks, but the whole literature of invective contains nothing more offensive than the language of Sumner which provoked it and which he lavished right and left upon opponents who were sometimes honourable. It was in the worst of taste.
In great affairs his service was certainly large. Perhaps he was at his highest in the settlement of the Trent affair , but his course in general in guiding our foreign relations was able and useful. He put his hand to much reconstruction of ideas and institutions. Often he made, but too often he marred. He suffered sadly from the lack of a sense of humour. "What does Lincoln mean?" he would blankly exclaim, impervious alike to the drollery and to the keen prod concealed within it. In his fancied superiority he sought to patronise and dominate the rude Illinoisian. The case is pathetic. The width and the depth of the chasm which separates the two men in the regard of the American people!
In speaking of soldiers I shall do better to pay slight attention to the men of chief importance; for them the trumpets have sounded sufficiently and I came into personal contact with only one or two. Grant, I saw once, after he was Lieutenant-General, on the platform of a railroad station submitting stoically to the compliments of a lively crowd of women. Once again I saw him, in academic surroundings, sturdy and impassive, an incongruous element among the caps and gowns; but it was among such men that he won what is to my mind one of his greatest victories. What triumph of Grant's was greater than his subjugation of Matthew Arnold! I rode once on the railroad-train for some hours immediately behind Sheridan, and had a good chance to study the sinewy little man in his trim uniform which showed every movement of his muscles. Though the ride was hot and monotonous I was impressed with his vitality. He seemed to have eyes all around his head. The man was in repose, but it was the repose of a leopard; at a sudden call, every fibre would evidently become tense, the servant of a nimble brain, and an instant pounce upon any opposition could be depended upon. What a pity, I found myself thinking, that the fellow has no longer a chance for his live energy (the war was then well over), and I had to check an incipient wish that a turmoil might arise that would again give a proper scope to his soldierly force. Happily there was no longer need for such service, but I feel that Sheridan was really more than a good sword. One finds in his memoirs unexpected outbursts of fancy and high sentiment, and he could admire the fine heroism of a character like Charles Russell Lowell. It is fair to judge a man by what he admires.
At the Harvard commemoration of 1865, standing under the archway at the northern end of Gore Hall, I encountered the thin, plainly clad figure of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I was in soldier's dress and as he gave me a nod of recognition he said, looking at my chevrons, very simply but with feeling, "This day belongs to you." Passing around then to the west front, I had before me a contrast in a brilliant group marshalled by my friend and classmate Colonel Theodore Lyman, in the centre of which rose the stately figure in full uniform of Major-General Meade. "Ah, Jimmy," said Theodore with the aggressive geniality which his old associates so well remember, "come right here," and catching me by the arm he pulled the corporal into the immediate presence of the victor of Gettysburg. "This is Corporal Hosmer," said he, "and this, Jimmy, is Major-General Meade," introducing us with much friendly patting of my shoulder and a handling of the Major-General almost equally familiar. He had long been a trusted member of Meade's staff but the war was over and a close friendship held them on common ground. "He has written a book, General, about the war." Then came a word of commendation and the tall General, as he gave my hand a cordial pressure, beamed down upon me with pleasant eyes. In the peaceful time that had come, we were all citizens together; the private and the General were on a level, though that aquiline face had been called upon not long before to confront, at the head of one hundred thousand men, the hosts of Lee.
Of our other great commanders I never saw Thomas, but my knowledge of Sherman was something more than the mere glimpse I had of the figures of his compeers. His home was in St. Louis, in which city I was then residing, and he was much in society. He was really a Connecticut Yankee though transplanted to Ohio, and he was, in figure and character, thoroughly a New Englander. He was tall and slender, his prominent forehead standing out from light straight hair, a stubby beard veiling a well-pronounced and well-worked jaw (for he was one of the readiest of talkers), it would require little scratching to get to the uncontaminated Yankee underneath. A New Englander of the best type, shrewd, kindly, deeply concerned for the welfare of his country and of men. A fashionable lady invited him to dine without his wife. Sherman, on arriving, found other ladies present; to his hostess, who came forward to receive him with effusion, he said: "Madam, I dine with Mrs. Sherman to-night," and the party went forward without the lion who was to have given it distinction. He would not have his wife slighted; nor in more important things would he endure to see a lame outcome when he might set things in better shape. He encouraged schools and worthy charities by giving them his hearty countenance. No arm was more potent than his in saving the country, nor was his patriotism selfish. He saved his country because he believed it was for the good of the world.
Sherman has been criticised for his ruthlessness, but no one can say that he was not effective. He bore on hard but with the belief that only such action could bring the war to a close. No one could come in contact with him without feeling that he was a soft-hearted man. It was one of the most interesting evenings of my life when, as a guest of N.O. Nelson, the philanthropic captain of industry in St. Louis, I was one of a company of a dozen to hear Sherman tell John Fiske his story of the war. We sat at table from seven o'clock until midnight, the two illustrious figures with their heads together exchanging a rapid fire of question and answer, but the rest of us were by no means silent. Sherman was full of affability and took good-naturedly the sharp inquiries. "How was it, General, at Shiloh; was not your line quite too unguarded on the Corinth side, and was not the coming on of Sidney Johnston a bad surprise for you?" "Oh, later in the war," said Sherman, "we no doubt should have done differently, but we got ready for them as they came on." "Was there not bad demoralisation," I said, "ten thousand or more skulkers huddled under the bluff on the Tennessee?" "Oh," said Sherman, "the rear of an army in battle is always a sorry place; but on the firing line, where I was, things did not look so bad."—"Your adversaries, General, were often good fellows, were they not, and you are good friends now?" "The best fellows in the world," said Sherman, "and as to friendship, Hood wants me to be his literary executor and take care of his memoirs."
He was ready to confess to mistakes, and with frank and proper exultation pointed out the gradual improvement and the triumphant result. Plenty of good stories and much hearty laughter came in among the more tragic episodes. We saw John Fiske take it all in, swaying in his chair ponderously back and forth, but the War in the Mississippi Valley , which came out soon after, showed that his memory retained every point. On another occasion, as Sherman on a stormy night took me home in his carriage, we skirted the blocks which had been the site of Camp Jackson, the first field of the Civil War that Sherman had witnessed. That was the beginning of things in the West, and he on that day only a by-stander. He was at the time possibly irresolute as to what he should do, and he certainly had no premonition of the large part he was destined to play. As he looked out of the window that night into the driving storm on the spot where once he had brooded so anxiously, I wondered if he had any memory of the soul struggle of that crisis.
After his death, there took place in the streets of St. Louis an imposing military funeral. As the cortège paused for a moment, I stood at the side of the gun-carriage which bore the coffin wrapped in the flag, and paid my tribute to this good man and great citizen who had played his part well.
A controversy, which has now died away, used to be waged during and soon after the Civil War as to whether West Point had really vindicated a place for itself. Many an American, full of that over-confidence which besets us, maintained that a man could become a good soldier by a turn of the hand as it were. Given courage, physical vigour, and fair practical aptitude, a lawyer, a merchant, or a civil engineer could take sword in hand and at short notice head a squadron or muster an army. This view has so far as I know been set forward by no one more plausibly than by Jacob D. Cox, a stout civilian soldier who led well the Twenty-third Corps and later became Governor of Ohio and a successful Secretary of the Interior. I once met General Cox in an interesting way, on a Sunday afternoon, at the home of Judge Alfonso Taft at Walnut Hills, a pleasant suburb of Cincinnati. Judge Taft in those days was a somewhat noteworthy figure. He had served the country well as Minister to Russia and also as a member of the Cabinet at Washington, and was one of the foremost men of the fair city where he lived. His sister-in-law married an intimate friend of mine, and there were other reasons which gave me some title to his notice, and I was for the time his guest. A sturdy white-haired boy of ten or so sat at the table at dinner and hung with his brothers about the group of elders as they talked in the afternoon. This boy was William H. Taft taking in the scraps of talk as the chatting progressed on his father's porch. General Cox dropped in for an afternoon call and I scanned eagerly his scholarly face and figure, well knit through the harshest experiences in camp and battle. He was a man of fine tastes and well accomplished both in science and literature with a substratum of manly tenacity and good sense, who did noble duty on many a field and produced, in his Military Reminiscences one of our most satisfactory books on the Civil War period. The manner of the veteran was simple and pleasant. Nothing betrayed that he had been the hero in such an eventful past. I have of course no thought of sketching his career or criticising his account of it. As to the point to which I have referred, his claim that a peaceful American can be turned into a soldier off-hand and that the West Pointers no more made good in the war than did the civilians, he sets forth the case calmly. He takes the curriculum at West Point as it was sixty years ago and plainly shows that as regards acquirements in general it bears a poor comparison with that of civilian universities and colleges of that period. As to especial military education, he claims that the instruction at West Point was comparatively trifling; the cadets were well drilled only in the elements, while as regards the larger matters of strategy and the management of armies there was slight opportunity to learn. The cadet came out qualified to drill a company or at most a regiment, while as to manoeuvring of divisions and corps he had no chance to perfect himself. The cadet, moreover, had this handicap—he had been made the slave of routine and his natural enterprise had been so far repressed that he magnified petty details and precedents and was slow to adapt himself to an unlooked-for emergency. He cites an example where he himself was set to fight a battle by a West Point superior with old-fashioned muzzle-loading guns, the improved arms which were at hand and which might easily have been used with good effect remaining in the rear. His conclusion is that a wide-awake American trained in the hustle of daily life, with a good basis of common sense and some capacity for adaptation, could, with a few month's experience, undertake to good advantage the direction of soldiers, and that the West Point preceding 1861 had an influence rather nugatory in bringing about success. It is perhaps sufficient answer to arguments of this kind that while during our Civil War there was a most relentless sifting of men for high positions, little regard being paid to the education and antecedents of those submitted to it, the men who finally emerged at the front were almost exclusively West Pointers. Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and Thomas, the Union champions par excellence , were West Pointers. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, the Johnstons, and Longstreet are no less conspicuous among the Confederates. Civilians for the most part were not found in the high places, or if they were so placed the results were unfortunate, as in the cases of Butler, Banks, and McClernand. There were of course good soldiers who came from civil life. Cox himself is a conspicuous instance, and there were Terry, John A. Logan, and other good division commanders. On the Southern side may be instanced N.B. Forrest and J.B. Gordon; but these men rarely attained to more than secondary positions, the highest places falling, as if by gravitation, into the hands of West Pointers. An influence there was in the little academy on the Hudson which somehow brought to pass a superior warlike efficiency. The training at West Point, supplemented as it usually was by campaigning on the plains, although duty was done only by men in squads, and the hardships and perils were scarcely greater than those encountered by the ordinary pioneer and railroad-builder, somehow evoked the field-marshal quality and made it easier to grapple with the tremendous problems with which the army was so suddenly confronted.
A certain pathos attaches to the story of some of those civilian soldiers. In my youthful days, I had often seen N.P. Banks, who had risen from the humblest beginning into much political importance. No large distinction can be claimed for him in any direction, and for elevation of character he was certainly not marked; but he was a man of respectable ability and he climbed creditably from factory-boy to mechanic and thence (through no noisome paths) to Congress, to the post of Governor, and to the Speakership at Washington.
He had military ambition and with the beginning of the war went at once into the army, unfortunately for him, as major-general and commander of a department. Could he have gone in as captain or colonel, his fortune would probably have been different. But, sent to command in the Shenandoah Valley, it was his fate to meet at the outset the most formidable of adversaries, Stonewall Jackson. He was sorely hoodwinked and humiliated, but so were several of his successors. At Cedar Mountain, understanding that his orders were peremptory, he threw his corps upon double their numbers and fought with all the bravery in the world though with defective tactics. Another corps should have been at hand, but it failed to arrive. There was a moment when Banks, weak though he was, was near to victory, but he failed in the end in an impossible task and was made scapegoat for the blunders of others. He was sent to supersede Butler in Louisiana with a force quite inadequate for the duty expected. It was here that I came into contact with him. Interested friends had laid my case before him, as one who might serve well in a higher position than that of a private, and he good-naturedly sent word to me to report to him at a certain hour in the rotunda of the St. Charles Hôtel at New Orleans. The city was in the firm grasp of the Union, as our transport had sailed up the evening before. The ships of Farragut, their decks crowded with blue jackets held under their broad-sides a dense and sullen multitude. A heavy salute reverberated from the river as the new commander took his place, but conditions were precarious.
As I walked up the street in my soldier's dress, a handsome Southern girl almost ran me off the sidewalk with a look in her face which, but for fear of the calaboose, might have been backed up by words and acts of insult, while the faces of the men were full of hate. I stood at last in the rotunda of the St. Charles Hôtel and presently the commander-in-chief, threading his way through a throng of officers, was at my side. I was much dishevelled and still ill after a stormy passage in a crowded ship, but the General was very courteous to the private. He had heard of my enlistment and indicated that he would be glad to utilise me, as he desired to utilise every man, for the best welfare of the service. What did I desire? I told him I had no thought but to do my duty as well as I could wherever I might be put. He discussed the situation reasonably, then offered me a clerkship at headquarters, where I might escape the chief perils of the campaign and where perhaps my education would serve the public. For a moment I hesitated and he passed on, leaving me to decide. My friends felt that I had not the physical strength for work in the field; should I accept the snug place back of the firing-line or risk it at the front? By the next day, I had fully determined to stick to my regiment. I sought the General again at headquarters. Colonel Irwin of his staff at the moment was arranging around his shoulders the yellow sash of the major-general for the formal ceremony of taking command, which was close at hand. But the General had a kindly recognition of the private, assented to my decision, and gave me a pass to the regiment, which had already been hurried onward to the front. I laid my knapsack down by the side of that of my young brother in the camp, which was then at the front.
Banks was a kindly man who meant and did the best he could for the humblest soldier in his army. His further military career I can only briefly sketch. He planned two fierce and calamitous assaults upon Port Hudson; errors no doubt, but Grant and Lee at the moment were making just such errors. The Red River campaign was a disastrous failure, but Banks had every handicap which a general could suffer: an insufficient force, a demand from the Administration that he should attend to a civil reordering when only fighting was in place, subordinates insolent and disobedient. And finally nature herself took arms against him, for the Red River fell when, by all precedents, it should have risen. It was an enterprise which his judgment utterly disapproved, the difficulties of which he faced with good resolution. It ended his career, for though once at a later time he went to Congress, he ever afterwards stood a discredited figure, dying, as I have heard, poor and broken-hearted in obscurity. His State has tried to render him a late justice by setting him up in bronze on Beacon Hill. It was done through opposition and the statue is sneered at more often than admired. He was an able man I believe and meant well, and I for one find it pathetic that the lines of my old commander did not fall more pleasantly.
Butler, on the other hand, I do not regard as a pathetic figure. On the night of my arrival in New Orleans, strolling about the strange city, I found myself at headquarters, and a Massachusetts boy standing sentry on the porch in a spirit of comradeship invited me up. As I ascended the steps Butler, who had been standing at the door, closed it with a crash and retired within. Through a crevice in the blinds he was plain to be seen seated at his desk in profound thought, his bull-dog face in repose, his rude forcefulness very manifest. His rule at New Orleans had come to an end and no doubt he was pondering it and dreaming of what the future had in store for him. His burly frame was relaxed, his bluff unshaken countenance with the queer sinister cast of the eyes fully lighted up by the lamp on his table. I studied him at leisure, his marvellous energy for a moment in repose. In those days his name was much in the mouths of men, and whatever may be said in his disfavour, it cannot be denied after fifty years that his rule of New Orleans was a masterpiece of resolution, a riding rough-shod over a great disaffected city which marked him as full of intrepidity and executive force. In the field he was a worse failure than ever Banks had been. In my idea he deserves in 1864 the characterisation by Charles Francis Adams. He was the Grouchy who made futile Grant's advance upon Richmond and he blundered at Fort Fisher, but he was a pachyderm of the toughest—too thick-skinned to be troubled by the scratches of criticism, always floundering to the front with unquenched energy, sometimes a power for good and sometimes for evil. It is hard to strike the balance and say whether for the most part he helped or hindered, but our past would lack a strong element of picturesqueness if old Ben Butler were eliminated.
There were pathetic figures among the West Pointers as well as among the civilian generals. At St. Louis, in the seventies, I used to see sometimes an unobtrusive man in citizen's dress, marked by no trait which distinguished him from the ordinary, a man serious in his bearing, who one might easily think had undergone some crushing blow. This was Major-General John Pope. His son was in our university and his sister, a most kind and gracious lady, was a near friend. Pope seems destined to go down in our history merely as a braggart and an incompetent. Probably no man of that time meant better or was more abused by capricious fate. Cox, whose daughter married the son of Pope and who therefore came to know him well in his later years, defends him vigorously. In the early years of the war he showed himself bold and active. The capture of Island Number Ten with its garrison was rather a naval and engineering exploit than an achievement of the army, but Pope seems to have done well what was required of him and probably deserved his promotion to the command of a corps at Corinth when an advance southward was meditated in the early summer of '62. It was with deep unwillingness that he received the summons of the Administration to command an army in Virginia, and only assumed the place from the feeling that a soldier must stand where he is put. Arrived at Washington, he found himself in an atmosphere hot with wrath and mortification. The Peninsular campaign had failed and strong spirits like Stanton and Ben Wade, Chairman of the Committee on the Conduct of the War, were on fire through disappointment. The new General, whose position until within a few months had been a humble one, was brow-beaten and dominated by powerful personalities and forced to stand for acts and words which were not really his own. He declared, said Cox, that his bombastic and truculent orders were practically dictated by others. The declaration that his headquarters would be his saddle, which Lee so wittily turned, saying, "then his headquarters would be where his hindquarters ought to be," Pope declares he never made. When his environment had in this way aroused prejudice against him, he was set to command an army whose higher officers felt outraged at his sudden rise over their heads and whose soldiers were discouraged by defeat. He was expected to oppose skilful and victorious foes with instruments that bent and broke in the crisis as he tried to wield them. Only supreme genius could have wrought success in such a situation, and that Pope did not at all possess. He was only a man of resolution, with no exceptional gifts, who desired to do his best for his country. In the West he had proceeded usefully and honourably, and it was the worst misfortune for him that he was taken for the new place. I hope that history will deal kindly with him and that, since he was a worthy and strenuous patriot, he will not live merely as an object of execration and ridicule.
In August, 1863, my too brief term of service having expired, I came home to the Connecticut Valley and resumed my pulpit, which I had left for a vacation and powder-smoke. Gettysburg and Vicksburg had taken place, and we at the North too fondly hoped that all was over and that we might confidently settle down to peace. When going west to Buffalo for a visit I was delayed a few hours at Syracuse and took the occasion to call on an intimate friend of my father and myself, the Rev. Samuel J. May. Mr. May, a bright and beautiful spirit, was by nature a strong peace man, but, fired by the woes of the slave, he had become an extreme abolitionist and was ready to fight for his principles. Entering Mr. May's quiet study I found him in intimate talk with a man of unassuming demeanour, in citizen's dress, marked by no distinction of face or figure. He might have been a delegate to a peace convention, or a country minister from way-back calling on a professional brother. What was my astonishment when Mr. May introduced him as Major-General Henry W. Slocum, commander of the Twelfth Corps, who, taking a short furlough after Gettysburg, was at home for the moment and had dropped in for a friendly call. Slocum had been in the thick of most of the bitter Virginia battles from the first, and all the world knew that at Gettysburg, by beating back the thrust of the Stonewall division toward the Baltimore pike, he had secured the threatened rear of the army of the Potomac and averted defeat. This had taken place in the preceding month, and I naturally marvelled that the unpretending, simple man could be that victorious champion, but for the time being we were there plain citizens, and, American fashion, the Major-General and the Corporal shook hands and fraternised on equal terms. It probably helped me with Slocum that I too had been in danger. About the time he was defending Culp's Hill, I had been in the ditch at the foot of the Port Hudson rampart.
While reticent as to his part at Gettysburg, he spoke with feeling of what his corps had been through, and knowing that both Mr. May and I were Massachusetts men took an evident pleasure in commending the regiments from that State. Of the 2d Massachusetts he spoke with high appreciation; it was an admirable body of men and thoroughly disciplined. It was always ready; its losses were fearful and he felt that he ought to spare it if he could, but a crisis always came when only the best would answer, and again and again the 2d Massachusetts was thrown in. Particularly at Gettysburg its services had been great and its sacrifice costly. He spoke feelingly of the young officers who had been slain and also of humbler men. Since that time I have stood by the simple stone at the "bloody swale at the foot of Culp's Hill," which marked the position held that day by the 2d Massachusetts. It takes no trained eye to see that it was a point of especial difficulty and importance. Some of the men of that regiment who fell that day were my own college comrades. I was glad to know from his lips that the commander thought their work heroic.
One naturally brackets the name of Slocum with that of Howard, secondary figures of course in the great Civil War drama and yet both steadfast and worthy soldiers. They rose together into places of responsibility during the Peninsular campaign, became commanders of corps about the same time, served side by side at Gettysburg, went together to the West, and finally, one at the head of Sherman's right wing and the other at the head of the left, made the march to the sea and through the Carolinas. Neither perhaps was a brilliant soldier. So far as the records show, Slocum always did his work well, was increasingly trusted to the last, and nowhere made a grave mistake. In Howard's case, the rout at Chancellorsville will always detract from his fame; he was, however, on that day new in his place, and the infatuation of Hooker by an evil contagion passed down to his lieutenants. But he too steadily improved, refusing resolutely to be discouraged by his mistakes and always doing better next time. Perhaps no one act during the war was more important than the occupation of Cemetery Hill on the morning of July 1, 1863, by a Federal division. I think that the credit of that act cannot be denied to Howard. In a later time he passed under the control of Sherman in the West, a shrewd and relentless judge of men, and Sherman trusted him to the utmost. To a group of officers in their cups who were chaffing Howard for being Puritanical, Sherman curtly said: "Let Howard alone; I want one general who doesn't drink."
I saw General Howard at Gettysburg on the fortieth anniversary of the battle. We were under the same roof, and during the evening I sat close to him in the common room and heard him talk,—a strenuous old man, his empty sleeve recalling tragically the combats through which he had passed. Close by under the stars could still be traced the lines occupied by Steinwehr's division, the troops which with such momentous results Howard had posted on Cemetery Hill. I might easily have talked with him, for he was affable to old and young, but I preferred to study the good veteran from a distance and let others draw out his story while I listened.
In the winter of 1861 I went to Port Royal, through the good offices of my friend Rufus Saxton, then a captain and quartermaster of the expedition under which Dupont had taken possession of the Sea Islands in South Carolina. The capture of Port Royal had taken place a few weeks before and the army was encamped on the conquered territory. Saxton was an interesting figure, who in an unusual way showed during the war a fine spirit of self-sacrifice. At the outbreak, a high position in the field was within his grasp; he was second in command to Lyon in St. Louis, and being intimate with McClellan might have held a position of responsibility in the field. He was indeed made a general. Once in 1862 he was in command of a considerable force, and when Banks was driven out of the Shenandoah Valley by Stonewall Jackson he withstood at Harper's Ferry the rush of the Confederates into Maryland. But at the solicitation of Lincoln and Stanton he gave up service in the field, for which he was well fitted and which he earnestly desired, to act as Military Governor of the Sea Islands, where his work was to receive and care for the thousands of negroes who by the flight of their masters in that region had been left to themselves. Here he remained throughout the war, while his old comrades were winning fame at the head of divisions and corps, a patient, humane teacher and administrator among the nation's wards. He was content to live through the stirring time inconspicuous, but he won the respect of all kindly hearts at the North and deep gratitude from the helpless blacks whom he so long and humanely befriended.
I came in contact during that visit with a number of soldiers soon to be famous. In the boat which carried me from the transport to the shore I had as a fellow-passenger James H. Wilson, then a lieutenant but soon to be a famous cavalry commander. He was a restless athletic young man, who when I met him was on fire with wrath over the giving up of Mason and Slidell, the news of which had come to the post by our steamer. I tried to argue with him, that we had enough on our hands with the South without rushing into war with England besides, but he was impetuously confident that we could take care of all foes outside and in, and maintained that the giving up of the envoys was a burning shame. His vigour and confidence were excessive, I thought, but they carried him far in a time soon to come.
I talked with General Thomas W. Sherman, the commander of the expedition, in his tent, but was more interested in a dispute which presently sprang up between the General and a companion of mine, Jonathan Saxton, father of Rufus Saxton, an abolitionist of the most perfervid type, a good talker and quite unabashed, plain farmer though he was, by a pair of epaulettes.
Among our regular officers there were few abolitionists. Rufus Saxton told me that Lyon was the only one of any distinction who could be so classed among the men he knew. T.W. Sherman was like his fellows and listened impatiently to what he felt was fanaticism gone mad, but the fluent old farmer drove home his radicalism undauntedly. T.W. Sherman before the war had been a well-known figure as commander of Sherman's flying artillery, which was perhaps the most famous organisation of the regular army, but his name scarcely appears in the history of the Civil War, more perhaps from lack of good fortune than of merit. He was crippled with wounds in the first important battle in which he was concerned. The two brigadiers at Port Royal, Horatio G. Wright and Isaac I. Stevens, both became soldiers of note. Wright was a handsome fellow in his best years, whom I recall stroking his chin with an amused quizzical expression while Jonathan Saxton poured out his Garrisonism. His brigade lay well to the south and his headquarters were at the old Tybee lighthouse which marked the entrance to the harbour of Savannah. I climbed with him up the sand hill, from the top of which we looked down upon Fort Pulaski then in Confederate hands and within short range. We peered cautiously over the summit, for shells frequently came from the fort. Wright held in his hand a fragment of one which had just before exploded. "How well it took the groove!" he said, pointing out to me the signs on the iron that the rifled cannon from which it had come had given the missile in the discharge the proper twist. Wright's after-career is part of the war's history, always strenuous and constantly rising. The fame which attaches to the Sixth Corps is largely due to the leadership of Wright. If he fell short at Cedar Creek in 1864 it was a lapse which may be pardoned in the circumstances. Sheridan retrieved the day and magnanimously palliated the misfortune of Wright. "It might have happened to me or to any man." The good soldier deserves the fine monument which stands by his grave in the foreground at Arlington.
I had at Port Royal a long and friendly talk with Isaac I. Stevens. He was already a man of note. After achieving the highest honours at West Point he had gone to the West, and in the great unexplored Pacific Northwest had conquered, built, and systematised until a fair foundation was laid for the fine civilisation which now sixty years later has been reared upon it. He was modest in his bearing, with well-knit and sinewy frame, and possessed at the same time refined manners and a taste for the higher things of life. Before the year had passed, his life went out in the second battle of Bull Run. In the end of that terrible campaign, he essayed with Phil Kearny to stem at Chantilly the rush of Stonewall Jackson upon Washington. The attempt was successful, but Stevens died waving the colours at the head of his men. It is said that Lincoln had marked him for the command of the Army of the Potomac. He had made good in all previous positions, and perhaps would have made good in the chief place, but here I stumble once more upon a might-have-been and am silent.
Dear ghosts of old-time friends swarm in my thought as I dream of those days. The white marbles in Memorial Chapel solemnly bear the names of Harvard's Civil War soldiers and tell how they died. There was one of whom I might say much, an elder companion, a wise and pleasant spirit who did something toward my shaping for life. A cannon-ball at Cold Harbor was the end for him. There was another, a brilliant, handsome young Irishman, bred a Catholic, who under the influence of Moncure D. Conway had come out as a Unitarian and left his Washington home for a radical environment in the North. He was brilliant and witty with small capacity or taste for persistent plodding, but forever hitting effectively on the spur of the moment. He was as chivalrous as a palladin and went to his early grave light-hearted, as part of the day's work which must not be shirked. I have his image vividly as he laughed and joked in our last interview. "Dress-parade at six o'clock; come over and see the dress-paradoes!" He fell wounded at Chancellorsville, and while being carried off the field was struck a second time as he lay on the stretcher, and so he passed.
There were fine fellows, too, in those days who stood on the other side: McKim, President of the Hasty Pudding Club, who fell in Virginia; W.H.F. Lee, who was in the Law School and whom I recall as a stalwart athlete rowing on the Charles. It helped me much a few years ago when I visited many Southern battle-fields that I could tell old Confederates "Rooney" Lee and I had in our youth been college mates. My classmate J.B. Clark of Mississippi was a graceful magnetic fellow who had small basis of scholarship, perhaps, but a marked power for effective utterance. He fascinated us by his warm Southern fluency, and we gave him at last the highest distinction we could confer, the class oration. He left us then and we did not see him for fifty years. He enlisted in the 21st Mississippi and passed through the roughest hardships and perils. We felt afterwards that he held coldly aloof from us through long years. At our jubilee, however, he came back wrinkled and white-haired, but quite recognisable as the fascinating boy of fifty years before. He had a long and good record behind him as an officer of the University of Texas, and we gave him reason to think that we loved him still. The most cordial meetings I have ever known have been those between men who had fought each other bitterly, each with an honest conviction that he was in the right, but who at last have come out on common ground.
Among the Harvard soldiers three stand out in my thought as especially interesting, William Francis Bartlett, Charles Russell Lowell, and Francis Channing Barlow. Bartlett was younger than I, entering service when scarcely beyond boyhood, losing a leg at Ball's Bluff, and when only twenty-three Colonel of the 49th Massachusetts. I remember well a beautiful night, the moon at the full, and the hospital on the river bank just below Port Hudson where hundreds of wounded men were arriving from a disastrous battle-field close at hand.
Bartlett had ridden into battle on horseback, his one leg making it impossible for him to go on foot, and he was a conspicuous mark for the sharpshooters. A ball had passed through his remaining foot, and still another through his arm, causing painful wounds to which he was forced to yield. He lay stretched out, a tall, slender figure with a clear-cut patrician face, very pale and still but with every sign of suffering stoically repressed. He was conscious as I stood for a moment at his side. It was not a time to speak even a word, but I hoped he might feel through some occult influence that a Harvard brother was there at hand, full of sympathy for him. He afterwards recovered in part, and, with unconquerable will, though he was only a fragment of a man, went in again and was still again stricken. He survived it all, and to me it was perhaps the most thrilling incident of the Harvard commemoration of 1865 to see Bartlett, too crippled to walk without their support, helped to a place of honour on the stage by reverent friends.
Charles Russell Lowell was in the class preceding mine; his father had been my father's classmate, and had done me many a favour; his mother was Mrs. Anna Jackson Lowell, one of the best and ablest Boston women of her time. In her house I had been a guest. Charles and James, the sons, were youths of the rarest intellectual gifts, each first scholar of his class, of whom the utmost was expected. How strange that fate should have made them soldiers! They both perished on the battle-field. As I remember Charlie Lowell, the boy was fitly the father of the man. We were playing football one day on the Delta, the old-fashioned game of those days, at which modern athletes smile, but which we old fellows think was a good tough game for all that. I had secured the ball, and thinking I had time, placed it rather leisurely, promising myself an effective kick. A slight figure bounded with lightning rush from the opposing line, and from under my very foot drove the ball far behind me to a point which secured victory.
How little I knew that I had just witnessed a small exhibition of the quickness and prompt decision which no long time after on critical battle-fields were to be put to splendid use. He proved to be a nearly perfect soldier; Sheridan said of him, that he knew of no virtue that could be added to Lowell. To us he seems one of the manliest of men, thoughtful for others, even for dumb beasts. In Edward Emerson's charming life of him, nothing, perhaps, is sweeter than his affection for his horses, of which it was said that thirteen were killed under him before he came to death himself. He studied their characters as if they had been human beings, and dwells in his letters on the particular lovable traits each one showed—these mute companions who stood so closely by him in life and death.
When our class first assembled in 1851 there was a slight boy of seventeen in the company, Francis Channing Barlow. He was inconspicuous through face or figure, but it early became clear that he was to be our first scholar, and a wayward deportment with an odd sardonic wit soon made him an object of interest. Barlow came admirably fitted, and this good preparation, standing back of great quickness and power of mind, made it easy for him almost without study to take a leading place. As a boy he was well grounded, outside of his special accomplishments, in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. I remember his telling me that his mother read Plutarch to him when he was a child, and that and many another good book he had thoroughly stored away. Such accomplishments were an exasperation to us poor fellows who had come in from the remote outskirts and found we must compete for honours with men so well equipped. We perhaps magnified the gifts and acquirements of the fellows who had been more favourably placed. Barlow seemed like a paragon of scholarship, and the nonchalance with which he always won in the classrooms was a constant marvel. He had a queer way of turning serious things into fun. With a freshman desire for self-improvement, a thing apt to evaporate in the college atmosphere, we had formed a society for grave writing and debate and hired for our meetings the lodge-room of the "Glorious Apollers" or some such organisation. At an early meeting of the society, while we were solemnly struggling through a dignified programme, Barlow suddenly appeared from a side-door rigged out most fantastically in plumes and draperies. He had somehow got hold of the regalia of the order and drawlingly announced himself as the great panjandrum who had come to take part. He danced and paraded before the conclave and had no difficulty in turning the session into a wild revel of extravagant guffaws and antics, and after that time the occasions were many when Barlow gave a comic turn to things serious. It was said that Barlow, going back and forth on the train between Concord and Boston as he did at one time, got hold of an impressionable brake-man, and by exhortation brought about in him a change of heart, after the most approved evangelical manner, counterfeiting perfectly the methods of a revivalist, which he did for the fun of the thing. The story, of course, was an invention, but quite in character.
He was no respecter of conventions and sometimes trod ruthlessly upon proprieties. "What will Barlow do next?" was always the question. In the class-room he was never rattled in any emergency, his really sound scholarship was always perfectly in hand and in a strait no one could bluff it with such sang-froid and audacity. He kept his place at the head of the class to the very end, but there Robert Treat Paine came out precisely his equal. Among the many thousand marks accumulating through four years the total for both men was exactly alike—a thing which I believe has never happened before or since.
Before the Arsenal in Cambridge stood an innocent old cannon that had not been fired since the War of 1812, perhaps not since the Revolution. The grass and flowers grew about its silent muzzle, and lambs might have fed there as in the pretty picture of Landseer. Any thought that the old cannon could go off had long ceased to be entertained. One quiet night a tremendous explosion took place; the cannon had waked up from its long sleep, arousing the babies over a wide region and many a pane of glass was shivered. What had got into the old cannon that night was long a mystery. Many years after Barlow was discovered at the bottom of it—it was the first shot he ever fired.
Dr. James Walker, the college president, said to a friend of mine at the beginning of the war, speculating on the probable futures of the boys who had been under his care, "There's Barlow, now he'll go in and come out at the top." Barlow had been a sad puzzle to the faculty, good men, often perplexed to know what to do with him or what would become of him. Dr. Walker's astuteness divined well the outcome. As I review those early years I can see now that Barlow then gave plain signs of the qualities which he was later to display. I remember sleeping with him once in a room in the top story of Stoughton in our sophomore year and he talked for a great part of the night about Napoleon. The Corsican was the hero who beyond all others had fascinated him, whose career he would especially love to emulate. We were a pair of boys in a peaceful college, living in a time which apparently would afford no opportunity for a soldier's career. I have often thought of that talk. Barlow was really not unlike the youthful Napoleon, in frame he was slender and delicate, his complexion verged toward the olive, his face was always beardless. I never saw him thrown off his poise in any emergency. The straits of course are not great in which a college boy is placed, but such as they were, Barlow was always cool, with his mind working at its best in the midst of them. He was never abashed, but had a resource and an apt one in every emergency. He was absolutely intrepid before the thrusts of our sharpest examiners and as I have said could bluff it boldly and dexterously where his knowledge failed; then the odd cynicism with which he turned down great pretentions and sometimes matters of serious import, had a Napoleonic cast. In '61 he enlisted as a private but rose swiftly through the grades to the command of a regiment. At Antietam he had part of a brigade and coralled in a meteoric way on Longstreet's front line some hundreds of prisoners. His losses were great but he was in the thick of it himself, his poise unruffled until he was borne desperately wounded from the field. The surgeon who attended him told me, if I remember right, that a ball passed entirely through his body carrying with it portions of his clothing, if such a thing were possible; but, with his usual nonchalance he laughed at wounds and while still weak and emaciated went back to his place again in the following spring at the head of a brigade. He underwent Chancellorsville, and for the Union cause it was a great misfortune that his fine brigade was taken from its place on Hooker's right before Stonewall Jackson made his charge. Had Barlow been there he might have done something to stay the disaster. At Gettysburg, however, he was in the front in command of a division. An old soldier, a lieutenant that day under Barlow, told me that he had charge of the ambulances of the division and on the march near Emmitsburg Barlow put into the lieutenant's especial charge the ambulance of his wife who, with a premonition of calamity, insisted on being near at hand to help. When the battle joined and Gordon swept overwhelmingly upon Barlow's division, the lieutenant had difficulty in restraining Mrs. Barlow from rushing at once upon the field among the fighting men. He held her back almost by force but she remained close at hand. Barlow was again desperately wounded, so hurt that his death seemed inevitable, and when the faithful wife, at last making her way, presented herself even in the rebel lines with a petition for her husband, supposed to be dying, Gordon chivalrously gave him up. It was magnanimous, but for him ill-timed. Again Barlow laughed at his wounds. In May, 1864, he was in the field at the head of the first division of Hancock's corps and on the 12th of May performed the memorable exploit, breaking fairly the centre of Lee's army and bringing it nearer to defeat than it ever came until the catastrophe at Appomattox. He captured the Spottsylvania salient together with the best division of the army of northern Virginia, Stonewall Jackson's old command, two generals, thirty colours, cannon, and small arms to correspond. John Noyes, a soldier of a class after us, told me that in the salient he and Barlow worked like privates in the confusion of the capture, turning with their own hands against the enemy a cannon that had just been taken. Barlow was as cool as when he fired off the old cannon in Cambridge ten years before. This stroke proved futile, but from no shortcoming of Barlow's. A few weeks later at Cold Harbor he effected a lodgment within the Confederate works when all others failed. That too proved futile, but his reputation was confirmed as one of the most brilliant of division commanders. There is a photograph in existence portraying Hancock and his division generals as they appeared during that terrible campaign. It was taken in the woods in the utmost stress of service. Barlow stands in the group just as he looked in college, the face thin and beardless, almost that of a boy, and marked with the nonchalance which always characterised him. There are no military trappings, a rough checked shirt, trousers, slouching from the waist to campaign boots, hang loosely about the attenuated limbs. Soon after that he was carried from the field, not wounded, but in utter exhaustion after exposures which no power of will could surmount. A few months' respite and he was at his post again, intercepting by a swift march Lee's retreating column, almost the last warlike act of the Army of the Potomac before Appomattox. In this "Last Leaf" I do not deal with "might-have-beens." I only remember, but we old classmates of Barlow have a feeling that had the war continued, if only the bullets to which he was always so hospitable had spared him, he would have gone on to the command of a corps, and perhaps even to greater distinctions. The photograph of Barlow, published after his death in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine , presents him as he was soon after the war was over. He had recovered from the hardships, the face is fairly well rounded but still rather that of a beardless, laughing boy than of a man. A stranger studying the face would hear with incredulity the story of the responsibilities and dangers which that face had confronted. He laughed it all off lightly, and that was his way when occasionally in his later years he came to our meetings.
I recall a reunion in 1865, ten years after our graduation. We sat in full numbers about a sumptuous banquet at the Parker House in Boston, and naturally in that year the returned soldiers were in the foreground. In our class were two major-generals, four colonels, a distinguished surgeon, and many more of lower rank. Barlow was the central figure. Theodore Lyman, who presided, introduced him with a glowing tribute, recounting his achievements, a long list from the time he had entered as a private to his culmination as a full Major-General. He called at last for nine cheers for the man who had captured the Spottsylvania salient, and we gave them with a roar that shook the building. Barlow was the only man in the room who showed not the slightest emotion. He stood impassive, his face wearing his queer smile. Other men might have been abashed at the tumultuous warmth of such a reception from his old mates; a natural utterance at such a time would have been an expression of joy that the war was over and that the country had been saved, coupled with modest satisfaction that he had borne some part in the great vindication, but that was not Barlow's way. He laughed it off lightly, as if it had been a huge joke. My classmate, the late Joseph Willard of Boston, told me of a reunion of the class at a time much later. The men were discussing the stained-glass window which it had been decided should be put in Memorial Hall. Since the class had a distinguished military record it was felt that there should be martial suggestion in the window and the question was what classic warrior should be portrayed. The face, it was thought, should have the lineaments of our most famous soldier. Barlow, who was present, pooh-poohed the whole idea, especially the suggestion that his face should appear, but someone present having suggested Alcibiades, probably not seriously as a proper type, that seemed to strike Barlow's sense of humour. That reckless classic scapegrace to his cynical fancy perhaps might pass, he might be Alcibiades, but who should be the dog? Alcibiades had a dog whose misfortune in losing his tail has been transmitted through centuries by the pen of Plutarch. "Who will be the dog?" said Barlow and called upon someone to furnish a face for the hero's canine companion. The scheme for the window came near to going to wreck amid the outbursts of laughter. It was carried through later, however, but Alcibiades and the dog do not appear, although Barlow does. No other Harvard soldier reached Barlow's eminence, and probably in the whole Army of the Potomac there were few abler champions. He was a strange, gifted, most picturesque personality, no doubt a better man under his cynical exterior than he would ever suffer it to be thought. His service was great, and the memory of him is an interesting and precious possession to those who knew him in boyhood and were in touch with him to the end.
The cataclysm of the Civil War, in which as the preceding pages show I had been involved, had shaken me in my old moorings. I found myself not content in a quiet parish in the Connecticut Valley, and as I fared forth was fortunate enough to meet a leader in a remarkable personage. Horace Mann was indeed dead, but remained, as he still remains, a power. His brilliant gifts and self-consecration made him, first, a great educational path-breaker. From that he passed into politics, exhibiting in Congress abilities of the highest. Like an inconstant lover, however, he harked back to his old attachment, and putting aside a fine preferment, the governorship of Massachusetts, it was said, forsook his old home for the headship of Antioch College in south-western Ohio. I shall not dispute here whether or not he chose wisely; much less, how far a lame outcome at Antioch was due to his human limitations, and how far to the inevitable conditions. He was a potent and unselfish striver for the betterment of men, and his words and example still remain an inspiration.
My father in these years was a trustee of Antioch College, and this brought our household into touch with the illustrious figure of whom all men spoke. My memory holds more than a film of him, rather a vivid picture, his stately height dominating my boyish inches, as I stood in his presence. He was spare to the point of being gaunt, every fibre charged with a magnetism which caused a throb in the by-stander. Over penetrating eyes hung a beetling brow, and his aggressive, resonant voice commanded even in slight utterances. I recall him in a public address. The newspapers were full of the Strassburg geese, which, nails being driven through their web feet to hold them motionless, were fed to develop exaggerated livers,—these for the epicures of Paris. "For health and wholesome appetite," he exclaimed, "I counsel you to eschew les patés de foie gras , but climb a mountain or swing an axe." No great sentence in an exhortation to vigorous, manful living. But the scornful staccato with which he rolled out the French, and the ringing voice and gesture with which he accompanied his exhortation, stamped it indelibly. From that day to this, if I have felt a beguilement toward the flesh-pots, I still hear the stern tones of Horace Mann. In general his eloquence was extraordinary, and I suppose few Americans have possessed a power more marked for cutting, bitter speech. His invective was masterly, and too often perhaps merciless, and it was a weapon he was not slow to wield on occasions large and small. In Congress he lashed deservedly low-minded policies and misguided blatherskites, but his wrathful outpourings upon pupils for some trivial offence were sometimes over-copious. There are Boston schoolmasters, still living perhaps, who yet feel a smart from his scourge. His personality was so incisive that probably few were in any close or long contact with him without a good rasping now and then. My father was the most amiable of men, yet even he did not escape. As an Antioch trustee he was in charge of funds which were not to be applied unless certain conditions were satisfied. Horace Mann demanded the money, and it was withheld on occasions and a deluge of ire was poured upon my poor father's head. It did not cause him to falter in his conviction of Horace Mann's greatness and goodness. Nor has this over-ready impetuosity ever caused the world to falter in its reverence. He came bringing not peace but a sword, in all the spheres in which he moved, and in Horace Mann's world it was a time for the sword. He was a path-breaker in regions obstructed by mischievous accumulations. There was need of his virile championship, and none will say that there was ever in him undue thought of self or indifference to the best humanity.
My father held fast to the sharp-cornered saint and prophet, though somewhat excoriated in the association. He held fast to his trusteeship of Antioch; and in 1866, Horace Mann having some years before been laid in his untimely grave, he stood in his place as president of the college. Through the agency of my dear friends of those years, Dr. Henry W. Bellows and Dr. Edward Everett Hale, I was to go with him as, so to speak, his under-study, discharging the work of English professor and sometimes the duties of preacher. I went gladly. The spirit of the dead leader haunted pervasively the shades where he had laboured and died. The tradition of Horace Mann was paramount among the students, the graduates, and the whole environment. I had felt as a boy the spell of his voice and presence and knew no hero whom I could follow more cordially. It was a joy to become domiciled in the house which had been built for him and where he had breathed his last, and to labour day by day along the noble lines which he had laid down. This was my post for six years, one of which, however, was spent in Europe, in the hope of gaining an added fitness for my place.
I have no mind to set down here a record of those Antioch years. One experiment we tried in a field then very novel and looked upon askance. To-day in our schools and universities the pageant and the drama play a large part. Forty years ago they were unknown or in hiding, and it may be claimed that our little fresh-water college bore a part in initiating a development that has become memorable and widely salutary. In 1872 I wrote out the story of our attempt for Mr. Howells, in the Atlantic Monthly , a film which may appropriately be staged among my pictures.
The New Wrinkle at Sweetbrier; or, The Drama in Colleges
I have been distressed, dear Fastidiosus, by your remonstrance concerning the performance at our college at Sweetbrier of a "stage play." You have heard the facts rightly; that it was given under the superintendence of the English professor, the evening before Commencement, "with many of the accessories of a theatre." You urge that it is unprecedented to have at a dignified institution, which aims at a high standard, under the superintendence of a professor, such a performance; that it excites the prejudices of some people against us; and you quote the sharp remarks of David's Harp , the organ of the Dunkers. You urge that such things can be nothing more than the play of boys and girls, and are something worse than mere waste of time, for they set young people to thinking of the theatre, which is irretrievably sunk and only harmful. In your character of trustee, you are sorry it has been done, and beg that it may not be done again.
I beg you to listen to a patient stating of the case. It is not without precedent. When you were at Worms, in Germany, do you remember in the Luther Memorial the superb figure of Reuchlin, on one of the outer corners? One or two of the statues may be somewhat grander, but no other seemed to me so handsome, as it stood colossal on its pillar, the scholar's gown falling from the stately shoulders, and the face so fine there in the bronze, under the abundant hair and cap. Reuchlin is said to be the proper founder of the German drama. Before his time there had been, to be sure, some performing of miracle-plays, and perhaps things of a different sort. The German literary historians, however, make it an era when Reuchlin came as professor to Heidelberg, and, in 1497, set up a stage, with students for actors, at the house of Johann, Kämmerer von Dalberg. He wrote his plays in Latin. If you wish, I can send you their titles. Each act, probably, was prefaced by a synopsis in German, and soon translations came into vogue, and were performed as well. On that little strip of level which the crags and the Neckar make so narrow, collected then, as now, a fair concourse of bounding youth. One can easily fancy how, when the prototypes of the trim Burschen of to-day stepped out in their representation, the applause sounded across to the vineyards about the Heiligenberg and Hirschgasse, and how now and then a knight and a dame from the court of the Kurfürst came down the Schlossberg to see it all. What Reuchlin began, came by no means to a speedy end. In the Jesuit seminaries in Germany, in Italy too, and elsewhere, as the Reformation came on, I find the boys were acting plays. This feature in the school was held out as an attraction to win students; and in Prague the Fathers themselves wrote dramas to satirise the Protestants, introducing Luther as the comic figure. But what occurred in the Protestant world was more noteworthy. As the choral singing of the schoolboys affected in an important way the development of music, so the school-plays had much to do with the development of the drama. Read Gervinus to see how for a century or two it was the schools and universities that remained true to a tolerably high standard, while in the world at large all nobler ideals were under eclipse. It was jocund Luther himself who took it under his especial sanction, as he did the fiddle and the dance, in his sweet large-heartedness finding Scriptural precedents for it, and encouraging the youths who came trooping to Wittenberg to relieve their wrestling with Aristotle and the dreary controversy with an occasional play. Melancthon, too, gave the practice encouragement, until not only Wittenberg, but the schools of Saxony in general, and Thuringia, whose hills were in sight, surpassed all the countries of Germany in their attention to plays. In Leipsic, Erfurt, and Magdeburg comedies were regularly represented before the schoolmasters. But it was at the University of Strassburg, even at the time when the unsmiling Calvin was seeking asylum there, that the dramatic life of the German seminaries found a splendid culmination. Yearly, in the academic theatre, took place a series of representations, by students, of marvellous pomp and elaboration. The school and college plays were of various characters. Sometimes they were from Terence, Plautus, or Aristophanes; sometimes modifications of the ancient mysteries, meant to enforce the Evangelical theology; sometimes comedies full of the contemporary life. There are several men that have earned mention in the history of German literature by writing plays for students. The representations became a principal means for celebrating great occasions. If special honour was to be done to a festival, or a princely visit was expected, the market-place, the Rathhaus, or the church was prepared, and it was the professor's or the schoolmaster's duty to direct the boys in their performance of a play. We get glimpses, in the chronicles, of the circumstances under which the representations took place. The magistrates, even the courts, lent brilliant dresses. One old writer laments that the ignorant people have so little sense for arts of this kind. "Often tumult and mocking are heard, for it is the greatest joy to the rabble if the spectators fall down through broken benches." The old three-storied stage of the mysteries was often retained, with heaven above, earth in the middle space, and hell below; where, according to the stage direction of the Golden Legend , "the devils walked about and made a great noise." Lazarus is described as represented in the sixteenth century before a hôtel, before which sat the rich man carousing, while Abraham, in a parson's coat, looked out of an upper window. This rudeness, however, belongs rather to the Volks-comödie than the Schul-comödie , whose adjuncts were generally far more rational, and sometimes even brilliant, as in the Strassburg representations. It was only in the seminaries that art was preserved from utter decay. One may trace the Schul-comödie until far down in the eighteenth century, and in the last mention of it I find appears an interesting figure. In 1780, at the military school in Stuttgart the birthday of the Duke of Würtemberg was celebrated by a performance of Goethe's Clavigo . The leading part was taken by a youth of twenty-one, with high cheek-bones, a broad, low, Greek brow above straight eyebrows, a prominent nose, and lips nervous with an extraordinary energy. The German narrator says he played the part "abominably, shrieking, roaring, unmannerly to a laughable degree." It was the young Schiller, wild as a pythoness upon her tripod, with the Robbers , which became famous in the following year.
But I do not mean, Fastidiosus, to cite only German precedents, nor to uphold the college drama with the names of Reuchlin, Melancthon, and Luther alone, majestic though they are. In the University of Paris the custom of acting plays was one of high antiquity. In 1392 the schoolboys of Angiers performed Robin and Marian , "as was their annual custom"; and in 1477 the scholars of Pontoise represented "a certain moralitie or farce, as is their custom." In 1558 the comedies of Jacques Grévin were acted at the College of Beauvais at Paris; but it is in the next century that we come upon the most interesting case. In the days of Louis XIV. the girls' school at St. Cyr, of which Madame de Maintenon was patroness, was, in one way and another, the object of much public attention. Mademoiselle de Caylus, niece of Madame de Maintenon, who became famous among the women of charming wit and grace who distinguished the time, was a pupil at St. Cyr, and in her memoirs gives a pleasant sketch of her school life. With the rest, "Madame de Brinon," she says,
first superior of St. Cyr, loved verse and the drama; and in default of the pieces of Corneille and Racine, which she did not dare to have represented, she composed plays herself. It is to her, and her taste for the stage, that the world owes Esther and Athalie , which Racine wrote for the girls of St. Cyr. Madame de Maintenon wished to see one of Madame de Brinon's pieces. She found it such as it was, that is to say, so bad that she begged to have no more such played, and that instead some beautiful piece of Corneille or Racine should be selected, choosing such as contained least about love. These young girls, therefore, undertook the rendering of Cinna , quite passably for children who had been trained for the stage only by an old nun. They then played Andromaque ; and, whether it was that the actresses were better chosen, or gained in grace through experience, it was only too well represented for Madame de Maintenon, causing her to fear that this amusement would fill them with sentiments the reverse of those which she wished to inspire. However, as she was persuaded that amusements of this sort were good for youth, she wrote to Racine, begging him to compose for her, in his moments of leisure, some sort of moral or historic poem, from which love should be entirely banished, and in which he need not believe that his reputation was concerned, since it would remain buried at St. Cyr. The letter threw Racine into great agitation. He wished to please Madame de Maintenon. To refuse was impossible for a courtier, and the commission was delicate for a man who, like him, had a great reputation to sustain. At last he found in the subject of Esther all that was necessary to please the Court.
So far Mademoiselle de Caylus. A French historian of literature draws a pleasing picture of the old Racine superintending the preparation of Esther ,
giving advice full of sense and taste on the manner of reciting his verses, never breaking their harmony by a vulgar diction, nor hurting the sense by a wrong emphasis. What a charm must the verses where Esther recounts the history of her triumph over her rivals have had in the mouth of Mademoiselle de Veillanne, the prettiest and most graceful of the pupils of St. Cyr! How grand he must have been, when, with that noble figure which Louis XIV. admired, he taught Mademoiselle de Glapion, whose voice went to the heart, to declaim the beautiful verses of the part of Mordecai!
The genius of Racine glows finely in Esther. In the choruses, the inspirations of the Hebrew prophets, framed as it were in a Greek mould, give impressive relief to the dialogue, as in Sophocles and Aeschylus. It was played several times, and no favour was more envied at the Court than an invitation to the representations. The literature of the time has many allusions to them. The splendid world, in all its lace and powder, crowded to the quiet convent. The great soldiers, the wits, the beautiful women were all there. The king and Madame de Maintenon sat in stiff dignity in the foreground. The appliances were worthy of the magnificent Court. In Oriental attire of silk sweeping to their feet, set off with pearl and gold, the loveliest girls of France declaimed and sang the sonorous verse. It is really one of the most innocent and charming pictures that has come down to us of this age, when so much was hollow, pompous, and cruel.
Hamlet says to Polonius, "My lord, you played once in the university, you say." To which Polonius replies, "That I did, my lord, and was accounted a good actor. I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed in the Capitol." Do not suppose, Fastidiosus, that the playing of Polonius was any such light affair as you and I used to be concerned in up in the fourth story of "Stoughton," when we were members of the Hasty Pudding. In the Middle Ages, in convents and churches, flourished the mysteries; but, says Warton, in the History of English Poetry , as learning increased, the practice of acting plays went over to the schools and universities. Before the sixteenth century we may find traces of dramatic vitality among the great English seminaries; but if the supposition of Huber, in his account of English universities, is correct, the real founder of the college drama in England was a character no less dignified than its founder in Germany. Erasmus, as he sits enthroned in a scholar's chair in the market-place at Rotterdam, the buildings about leaning on their insecure foundations out of the perpendicular, and the market-women, with their apple-bloom complexions, crowding around him, shows a somewhat withered face and figure, less genial than the handsome Heidelberg professor as he stands at Worms. But it was Erasmus, probably, who, among many other things he did while in England, lent an important impulse to the acting of plays by students. He, no doubt, was no further interested than to have masterpieces of Greek and Latin drama represented, that the students might have exercise in those languages; but before the reign of Henry VIII. was finished, the practice was becoming pursued for other ends, and growing in importance. Gammer Gurton's Needle , long supposed to be the first English comedy, was first acted by students at Cambridge. That our more rollicking boys had their counterparts then, we may know from its rousing drinking-song, which the fellows rang out at the opening of the second act, way back there in 1551. The chorus is not yet forgotten:
"Backe and side go bare, go bare,
Booth foot and hand go colde;
But, belly, God send thee good ale inoughe,
Whether it be new or olde!"
For the most part, probably, the performances were of a more dignified character than this. Among the statutes of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1546, there is one entitled de praefectu ludorum qui imperator dicitur , under whose direction and authority Latin comedies are to be exhibited in the hall at Christmas. This "imperator" must be a master of arts, and the society was to be governed by a set of laws framed in Latin verse. The authority of this potentate lasted from Christmas to Candlemas, during which time six spectacles were to be represented. Dr. John Dee, a prodigy of that century, who might have been illustrious like Bacon almost, but who wasted his later years in astrological dreams, in his younger life, while Greek lecturer at Cambridge, superintended in the refectory of the college the representation of the [Greek: Eirhênê ]; of Aristophanes, with no mean stage adjuncts, if we may trust his own account. He speaks particularly of the performance of a "Scarabeus, his flying up to Jupiter's palace with a man and his basket of victuals on his back; whereat was great wondering and many vain reports spread abroad of the means how that was effected." The great Roger Ascham, too, has left an indirect testimony to the splendour with which the Cambridge performances at this time were attended. In a journey on the Continent, wishing to express in the highest terms his sense of the beauty of Antwerp, he can say nothing stronger than that it as far surpasses other cities as the refectory of St. John's College at Cambridge, when adorned for the Christmas plays, surpasses its ordinary appearance. On these occasions, the most dignified personages of the University were invited, and at length, as was the German fashion, the representation of plays was adopted as part of the entertainment of visitors. In 1564, Queen Elizabeth visited Cambridge, and the picture transmitted to us of the festivities is full of brilliant lights. With the rest, five doctors of the University selected from all the colleges the youths of best appearance and address, who acted before the queen a series of plays of varied character, sometimes grave, sometimes gay, in part of classic, in part of contemporary authorship. The theatre for the time was no other place than the beautiful King's College chapel, across the entire width of which the stage was built. For light, the yeomen of the royal guard, their fine figures in brilliant uniform, stood in line from end to end of the chapel, each holding a torch. It was a superb scene, no doubt; the torches throwing their wavering glare against the tracery and the low, pointed arch of window and portal, so beautiful in this chapel, in the ruins of Kenilworth, or wherever it appears; the great space filled with the splendour that Roger Ascham thought so wonderful; and, among the glitter, the troop of handsome youths doing their best to please the sovereign. Froude gives a story from De Silva, the Spanish ambassador, which reflects so well the character of the time, and shows up boyish human nature with such amusing faithfulness, that I cannot omit it. When all was over, the students would not let well enough alone, but begged the tired queen to see one more play of their own devising, which they felt sure would give her special pleasure. The queen, however, departed, going ten miles on her journey to the seat of one of her nobility. The persistent boys followed her, and she granted them permission to perform before her in the evening. What should the unconscionable dogs do but drag in the bitter trouble of the time, and heedlessly trample on the queen's prejudices. The actors entered dressed like the bishops of Queen Mary, who were then in prison. Bonner carried a lamb, at which he rolled his eyes and gnashed his teeth. A dog brought up the rear, carrying the Host in his mouth. What further was to follow no one can say. The queen, who was never more than half a Protestant, and clung to the mass all the more devoutly because she was obliged to resign so much, filled the air with her indignation. She swore good round oaths, we may be sure, and left the room in a rage. The lights were put out, and the students made off in the dark as they could.
The history of the drama at Oxford has episodes of equal interest. The visitor who goes through the lovely Christ Church meadows to the Isis to see the boats, returning, will be sure to visit the refectory of Christ Church. The room is very fine in its proportions and decoration, and hung with the portraits of the multitude of brilliant men who in their young days were Christ Church men. During all the centuries that the rich dark stain has been gathering upon the carved oak in the ceiling and wainscot, it has been the scene of banquets and pageants without number, at which the most illustrious characters of English history have figured. I doubt, however, if any of its associations are finer than those connected with the student plays that have been performed here. Passing over occasions of this kind of less interest of which I find mention, in 1566 Elizabeth visited Oxford, to do honour to whom in this great hall of Christ Church plays were given. Oxford was determined not to be outdone by what had happened at Cambridge two years before. From the accounts, the delight of the hearty queen must have been intense; and as she was never afraid to testify most frankly her genuine feelings, we may be sure the Oxford authorities and their pupils must have presented their entertainments with extraordinary pomp. The plays, as at Cambridge, were of various character, but the one that gave especial pleasure was an English piece having the same subject as the Knighte's Tale of Chaucer , and called Palamon and Arcite . It would be pleasant to know that the poet followed as far as possible the words of Chaucer. There is a fine incident narrated connected with the performance. In the scene of the chase, when
"Theseus, with alle joye and blys,
With his Ypolite, the faire queene,
And Emelye, clothed al in greene,
On hontyng be they riden ryally,"
a "cry of hounds" was counterfeited under the windows in the quadrangle. The students present thought it was a real chase, and were seized with a sudden transport to join the hunters. At this, the delighted queen, sitting in stiff ruff and farthingale among her maids of honour, burst out above all the tumult with "Oh, excellent! These boys, in very truth, are ready to leap out of the windows to follow the hounds!" When the play was over, the queen called up the poet, who was present, and the actors, and loaded them with thanks and compliments.
When, forty years after, in 1605, the dull James came to Oxford, the poor boys had a harder time. A thing very noteworthy happened when the king entered the city in his progress from Woodstock. If Warton's notion is correct, scarcely the iron cross in the pavement that marks the spot where the bishops were burned, or the solemn chamber in which they were tried, yea, scarcely Guy Fawkes's lantern, which they show you at the Bodleian, or the Brazen Nose itself, are memorials as interesting as the archway leading into the quadrangle of St. John's College, under whose carving, quaint and graceful, one now gets the lovely glimpse into the green and bloom of the gardens at the back. At this gate, three youths dressed like witches met the king, declaring they were the same that once met Macbeth and Banquo, prophesying a kingdom to one and to the other a generation of monarchs, that they now appeared to show the confirmation of the prediction. Warton's conjecture is that Shakespeare heard of this, or perhaps was himself in the crowd that watched the boys as they came whirling out in their weird dance, and that then and there was conceived what was to become so mighty a product of the human brain,—Macbeth.
King James, however, received it all coldly. The University, kindled by the traditions of Elizabeth's visit, did its best. Leland gives a glimpse of the stage arrangements in Christ Church Hall. Towards the end "was a scene like a wall, painted and adorned by stately pillars, which pillars would turn about, by reason whereof, with the help of other painted cloths, their stage did vary three times." But the king liked the scholastic hair-splitting with which he was elsewhere entertained better than the plays. In Christ Church Hall he yawned and even went to sleep, saying it was all mere childish amusement. In fact, the poor boys had to put up with even a worse rebuff; the king spoke many words of dislike, and when, in one of the plays, a pastoral, certain characters came in somewhat scantily attired, the queen and maids of honour took great offence, in which the king, who was not ordinarily over-delicate, concurred.
The practice of acting plays prevailed in the schools as well. The visitor to Windsor will remember in what peace, as seen from the great tower, beyond the smooth, dark Thames, the buildings of Eton lie among the trees. Crossing into the old town and entering the school precincts, where the stone stairways are worn by so many generations of young feet, and where on the play-ground the old elms shadow turf where so many soldiers and statesmen have been trained to struggle in larger fields, there is nothing after all finer than the great hall. In every age since the wars of the Roses, it has buzzed with the boisterous life of the privileged boys of England, who have come up afterward by the hundred to be historic men. There are still the fireplaces with the monogram of Henry VI., the old stained glass, the superb wood carving, the dais at the end. If there were no other memory connected with the magnificent hall, it would be enough that here, about 1550, was performed by the Eton boys, Ralph Roister Bolster , the first proper English comedy, written by Nicholas Udal, then head-master, for the Christmas holidays. He had the name of being a stern master, because old Tusser has left it on record that Udal whipped him,—
"for fault but small, or none at all."
But the student of our old literature, reading the jolly play, will feel that, though he could handle the birch upon occasion, there was in him a fine genial vein. This was the first English comedy. The first English tragedy, too, Gorboduc , was acted first by students,—this time students of law of the Inner Temple,—and the place of performance was close at hand to what one still goes to see in the black centre of the heart of London, those blossoming gardens of the Temple, verdant to-day as when the red-cross knights walked in them, or the fateful red and white roses were plucked there, or the voices of the young declaimers were heard from them, rolling out the turgid lines of Sackville's piece, the somewhat unpromising day-spring which a glorious sun-burst was to succeed. From Lincoln's Inn, in 1613, when the Princess Elizabeth married the elector-palatine and went off to Heidelberg Castle, the students came to the palace with a piece written by Chapman, and the performance cost a thousand pounds.
A famed contemporary of Udal was Richard Mulcaster, head-master of St. Paul's school, and afterward of Merchant Taylors', concerning whom we have, from delightful old Fuller, this quaint and naive description:
In a morning he would exactly and plainly construe and parse the lesson to his scholars, which done, he slept his hour (custom made him critical to proportion it) in his desk in the school; but woe be to the scholar that slept the while. Awaking, he heard them accurately; and Atropos might be persuaded to pity as soon as he to pardon where he found just fault. The prayers of cockering mothers prevailed with him just as much as the requests of indulgent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating his severity on their offending children.
The name of this Rhadamanthus of the birch occurs twice in entries of
Elizabeth's paymaster, as receiving money for plays acted before
her; and a certain proficiency as actors possessed by students of
St. John's College at Oxford is ascribed to training given by old
Mulcaster at the Merchant Taylors' school.
But no one of the great English public schools has enjoyed so long a fame in this regard as Westminster. According to Staunton, in his Great schools of England , Elizabeth desired to have plays acted by the boys, "Quo juventus turn actioni tum pronunciationi decenti melius se assuescat," that the youth might be better trained in proper bearing and pronunciation. The noted Bishop Atterbury wrote to a friend, Trelawney, Bishop of Winchester, concerning a performance here of Trelawney's son: "I had written to your lordship again on Saturday, but that I spent the evening in seeing Phormio acted in the college chamber, where, in good truth, my lord, Mr. Trelawney played Antipho extremely well, and some parts he performed admirably." In 1695, Dryden's play of Cleomens was acted. Archbishop Markham, head-master one hundred years ago, gave a set of scenes designed by Garrick. In our own day, Dr. Williamson, head-master in 1828, drew attention in a pamphlet to the proper costuming of the performers; and when, in 1847, there was a talk of abolishing the plays, a memorial signed by six hundred old "Westminsters" was sent in, stating it as their "firm and deliberate belief, founded on experience and reflection, that the abolition of the Westminster play cannot fail to prove prejudicial to the interests and prosperity of the school." At the present time the best plays of Plautus and Terence are performed at Christmas in the school dormitory.
It all became excessive, and in Cromwell's time, with the accession of the Puritans to power, like a hundred other brilliant traits of the old English life from whose abuse had grown riot, it was purged away. Ben Jonson, in The Staple of Newes , puts into the mouth of a sour character a complaint which no doubt was becoming common in that day, and was probably well enough justified.
"They make all their schollers play-boyes! Is't not a fine sight to see all our children made enterluders? Doe we pay our money for this? Wee send them to learne their grammar and their Terence and they learne their play-bookes. Well they talk we shall have no more parliaments, God blesse us! But an we have, I hope Zeale-of-the-land Buzzy, and my gossip Rabby Trouble-Truth, will start up and see we have painfull good ministers to keepe schoole, and catechise our youth; and not teach 'em to speake plays and act fables of false newes."
Studying this rather unexplored subject, one gets many a glimpse of famous characters in interesting relations. Erasmus says that Sir Thomas More, "adolescens, comoediolas et scripsit et egit," and while a page with Archbishop Moreton, as plays were going on in the palace during the Christmas holidays, he would often, showing his schoolboy accomplishment, step on the stage without previous notice, and exhibit a part of his own which gave more satisfaction than the whole performance besides.
In Leland's report of the theatricals where King James behaved so ungraciously, "the machinery of the plays," he says, "was chiefly conducted by Mr. Jones, who undertook to furnish them with rare devices, but performed very little to what was expected." This is believed to have been Inigo Jones, who soon was to gain great fame as manager of the Court masques. The entertainment was probably ingenious and splendid enough, but every one took his cue from the king's pettishness, and poor "Mr. Jones" had to bear his share of the ill-humour.
In 1629 a Latin play was performed at Cambridge before the French ambassador. Among the student spectators sat a youth of twenty, with long locks parted in the middle falling upon his doublet, and the brow and eyes of the god Apollo, who curled his lip in scorn, and signalised himself by his stormy discontent. Here is his own description of his conduct: "I was a spectator; they thought themselves gallant men, and I thought them fools; they made sport, and I laughed; they mispronounced, and I misliked; and to make up the Atticism, they were out and I hissed." It was the young Milton, in the year in which he wrote the Hymn on the Nativity.
Do I need to cite other precedents for the procedure at the Sweetbrier? I grant you it cannot be done from the practice of American colleges. The strictest form of Puritanism stamped itself too powerfully upon our New England institutions at their foundation, and has affected too deeply the newer seminaries elsewhere in the country, to make it possible that the drama should be anything but an outlaw here. Nevertheless, at Harvard, Yale, and probably every considerable college of the country, the drama has for a long time led a clandestine life in secret student societies, persecuted or at best ignored by the college government,—an unwholesome weed that deserved no tending, if it was not to be at once uprooted.
I do not advocate, Fastidiosus, a return to the ancient state of things, which I doubt not was connected with many evils; but is there not reason to think a partial revival of the old customs would be worth while? It was not for mirth merely that the old professors and teachers countenanced the drama. To the editors of David's Harp I have sent this passage from Milton, noblest among the Puritans, and have besought them to lay it before their consistory: "Whether eloquent and graceful incitements, instructing and bettering the nation at all opportunities, not only in pulpits, but after another persuasive method, in theatres, porches, or whatever place or way, may not win upon the people to receive both recreation and instruction, let them in authority consult." The German schoolmasters and professors superintended their boys in the representation of religious plays to instruct them in the theology which they thought all-important; in the performance of Aristophanes and Lucian, Plautus and Terence, mainly in the hope of improving them in Greek and Latin: and when the plays were in the vernacular, it was often to train their taste, manners, and elocution. Erasmus and the Oxford and Cambridge authorities certainly had the same ideas as the Continental scholars. So the English schoolmasters in general, who also managed in the plays to give useful hints in all ways. For instance, Nicholas Udal, in the ingenious letter in Ralph Roister Doister , which is either loving or insulting according to the position of a few commas or periods, must have meant to enforce the doctrine of Chaucer's couplet:
"He that pointeth ill,
A good sentence may oft spill."
Madame de Maintenon was persuaded that amusements of this sort have a value, "imparting grace, teaching a polite pronunciation, and cultivating the memory"; and Racine commends the management of St. Cyr, where "the hours of recreation, so to speak, are put to profit by making the pupils recite the finest passages of the best poets." Here is the dramatic instinct, almost universal among young people, and which has almost no chance to exercise itself, except in the performance of the farces to which we are treated in "private theatricals." Can it not be put to a better use? It would be a cumbrous matter to represent or listen to the Aulularia , or the Miles Gloriosus , or the [Greek: Eirhênê], in which Dr. Dee and his Scarabeus figured so successfully. The world is turned away from that[1]; but here is the magnificent wealth of our own old dramatic literature, in which is contained the richest poetry of our language. It was never intended to be read, but to be heard in living presentment. For the most part it lies almost unknown, except in the case of Shakespeare, and him the world knows far too little. Who does not feel what a treasure in the memory are passages of fine poetry committed early in life?
[Footnote 1: The developments of the last forty years show this judgment to be erroneous.]
Who can doubt the value to the bearing, the fine address, the literary culture of a youth of either sex that might come from the careful study and the attempt to render adequately a fine conception of some golden writer of our golden age, earnestly made, if only partially successful?
I say only partially successful, but can you doubt the capacity of our young people to render in a creditable way the conceptions of a great poet? Let us look at the precedents again. When Mademoiselle de Caylus, in her account of St. Cyr, speaks of the representation of Andromaque , she writes, "It was only too well done." And prim Madame de Maintenon wrote to Racine: "Our young girls have played it so well they shall play it no more"; begging him to write some moral or historic poem. Hence came the beautiful masterpiece Esther , to which the young ladies seem to have done the fullest justice, for listen to the testimony. The brilliant Madame de Lafayette wrote: "There was no one, great or small, that did not want to go, and this mere drama of a convent became the most serious affair of the court." That the admiration was not merely feigned because it was the fashion, here is the testimony of a woman of the finest taste, Madame de Sévigné, given in her intimate letters to her daughter, who, in these confidences, spared no one who deserved criticism:
The king and all the Court are charmed with Esther . The prince has wept over it. I cannot tell you how delightful the piece is. There is so perfect a relation between the music, the verses, the songs, and the personages, that one seeks nothing more. The airs set to the words have a beauty which cannot be borne without tears, and according to one's taste is the measure of approbation given to the piece. The king addressed me and said, "Madame, I am sure you have been pleased." I, without being astonished, answered, "Sire, I am charmed. What I feel is beyond words." The king said to me, "Racine has much genius." I said to him, "Sire, he has much, but in truth these young girls have much too; they enter into the subject as if they had done nothing else." "Ah! as to that," said he, "it is true." And then his Majesty went away and left me the object of envy.
Racine himself says in the Preface to Esther :
The young ladies have declaimed and sung this work with so much modesty and piety, it has not been possible to keep it shut up in the secrecy of the institution; so that a diversion of young people has become a subject of interest for all the Court;
and what is still more speaking, he wrote at once the Athalie , "la chef d'oeuvre de la poésie française," in the judgment of the French critics, to be rendered by the some young tyros. When, in 1556, in Christ Church Hall, Palamon and Arcite was finished, outspoken Queen Bess, with her frank eyes full of pleasure, declared "that Palamon must have been in love indeed. Arcite was a right martial knight, having a swart and manly countenance, yet like a Venus clad in armour." To the son of the dean of Christ Church, the boy of fourteen, who played Emilie in the dress of a princess, her compliment was still higher. It was a present of eight guineas,—for the penurious sovereign, perhaps, the most emphatic expression of approval possible.
Shall I admit for a moment that our American young folks have less grace and sensibility than the French girls, and the Oxford youths who pleased Elizabeth? Your face now, Fastidiosus, wears a frown like that of Rhadamanthus; but I remember our Hasty-Pudding days, when you played the part of a queen, and behaved in your disguise like Thor, in the old saga, when he went to Riesenheim in the garb of Freya, and honest giants, like Thrym, were frightened back the whole width of the hall. Well, I do not censure it, and I do not believe you recall it with a sigh; and the reminiscence emboldens me to ask you whether it would not be still better if our dear Harvard, say (the steam of the pudding infects me through twenty years), among the many new wrinkles she in her old age so appropriately contracts, should devote an evening of Commencement-time to a performance, by the students, under the sanction and direction of professors, of some fine old masterpiece?
At our little Sweetbrier we have young men and young women together, as at Oberlin, Antioch, and Massachusetts normal schools. I have no doubt our Hermione, when we gave the Winter's Tale , had all the charm of Mademoiselle de Veillanne, who played Esther at St. Cyr. I have no doubt our Portia, in the Merchant of Venice , in the trial scene, her fine stature and figure robed in the doctor's long silk gown, which fell to her feet, and her abundant hair gathered out of sight into an ample velvet cap, so that she looked like a most wise and fair young judge, recited
"The quality of mercy is not strained,"
in a voice as thrilling as that in which Mademoiselle de Glapion gave the part of Mordecai. I am sure Queen Elizabeth would think our young cavaliers, well-knit and brown from the baseball-field, "right martial knights, having swart and manly countenances." If she could have seen our Antoninus, when we gave the act from Massinger's most sweet and tender tragedy of the Virgin Martyr , or the noble Caesar, in our selections from Beaumont and Fletcher's False One , she would have been as ready with the guineas as she was in the case of the son of the dean of Christ Church.
Our play at the last Commencement was Much Ado about Nothing . It was selected six months before, and studied with the material in mind, the students in the literature class, available for the different parts. What is there, thought I, in Beatrice—sprightliness covering intense womanly feeling—that our vivacious, healthful Ruth Brown cannot master; and what in Benedick, her masculine counterpart, beyond the power of Moore to conceive and render? It is chiefly girlish beauty and simple sweetness that Hero requires, so she shall be Edith Grey. Claudio, Leonato, Don John, Pedro,—we have clean-limbed, presentable fellows that will look and speak them all well; and as for lumbering Dogberry, Abbot, with his fine sense of the ludicrous, will carry it out in the best manner. A dash of the pencil here and there through the lines where Shakespeare was suiting his own time, and not the world as it was to be after three hundred refining years, and the marking out of a few scenes that could be spared from the action, and the play was ready; trimmed a little, but with not a whit taken from its sparkle or pathos, and all its lovelier poetry untouched.
Then came long weeks of drill. In the passage,
"O my lord,
When you went onward to this ended action,
I looked upon her with a soldier's eye," etc.,
Claudio caught the fervour and softness at last, and seemed (it would have pleased Queen Bess better than Madame de Main tenon) like Palamon, in love indeed. Ursula and Hero rose easily to the delicate poetry of the passages that begin,
"The pleasantest angling is to see the fish
Cut with her golden oars the silver stream,"
and
"Look where Beatrice like a lapwing runs."
Pedro got to perfection his turn and gesture in
"The wolves have preyed; and look, the gentle day,
Before the wheels of Phoebus, round about
Dapples the drowsy east with spots of gray."
With the rough comedy of Dogberry and the watchmen, that foils so well the sad tragedy of poor Hero's heart-breaking, and contrasts in its blunders with the diamond-cut-diamond dialogue of Benedick and Beatrice, there was less difficulty. From first to last, it was engrossing labour, as hard for the trainer as the trained, yet still delightful work; for what is a conscientious manager, but an artist striving to perfect a beautiful dramatic picture? The different personages are the pieces for his mosaic, who, in emphasis, tone, gesture, by-play, must be carved and filed until there are no flaws in the joining, and the shading is perfect. But all was ready at last, from the roar of Dogberry at the speech of Conrade,
"Away! you're an ass! you're an ass!"
to the scarcely articulate agony of Hero when she sinks to the earth at her lover's sudden accusation,
"O Heavens! how am I beset!
What kind of catechising call you this?"
I fancy you ask, rather sneeringly, as to our scenery and stage adjuncts. Once, in the great court theatre at Munich, I saw Wagner's Rheingold. The king was present, and all was done for splendour that could be done in that centre of art. When the curtain rose, the whole great river Rhine seemed to be flowing before you across the stage, into the side of whose flood you looked as one looks through the glass side of an aquarium. At the bottom were rocks in picturesque piles; and, looking up through the tide to the top, as a diver might, the spectator saw the surface of the river, with the current rippling forward upon it, and the sunlight just touching the waves. Through the flood swam the daughters of the Rhine, sweeping fair arms backward as they floated, their drapery trailing heavy behind them, darting straight as arrows, or winding sinuously, from bottom to top, from side to side, singing wildly as the Lorelei. The scene changed, and it was the depths of the earth, red-glowing and full of gnomes. And a third time, after a change, you saw from mountain-tops the city which the giants had built in the heavens for the gods,—a glittering dome or pinnacle now and then breaking the line of white palaces, now and then a superb cloud floating before it, until, at last, a mist seemed to rise from valleys below, wrapping it little by little, till all became invisible in soft gradations of vapoury gloom. I shall never again see anything like that, where an art-loving court subsidises heavily scene-painter and machinist; but for all that, is it wise to have only sneers for what can be brought to pass with more modest means? Our hall at Sweetbrier is as large as the Christ Church refectory, and handsomely proportioned and decorated. A wide stage runs across the end. We found some ample curtains of crimson, set off with a heavy yellow silken border of quite rich material, which had been used to drape a window that had disappeared in the course of repairs. This, stretched from side to side, made a wall of brilliant colour against the gray tint of the room; and possibly Roger Ascham, seeing our audience-room before and after the hanging of it, might have had a thought of Antwerp. The stage is the one thing in the world privileged to deceive. The most devoted reader of Ruskin can tolerate shams here. The costumes were devised with constant reference to Charles Knight, and, to the eye, were of the gayest silk, satin, and velvet. There was, moreover, a profusion of jewels, which, for all one could see, sparkled with all the lustre of the great Florentine diamond, as you see it suspended above the imperial crowns in the Austrian Schatz-Kammer at Vienna. The contrasts of tint were well attended to. Pedro was in white and gold, Claudio in blue and silver, Leonato in red; while our handsome Benedick, a youth of dark Italian favour, in doublet of orange, a broad black velvet sash, and scarlet cloak, shone like a bird of paradise.
There was a garden-scene, in the foreground of which, where the eyes of the spectators were near enough to discriminate, were rustic baskets with geraniums, fuchsias, and cactuses, to give a southern air. In the middle distance, armfuls of honeysuckle in full bloom were brought in and twined about white pilasters. There was an arbour overhung with heavy masses of the trumpet-creeper. A tall column or two surmounted with graceful garden-vases were covered about with raspberry-vines, the stems of brilliant scarlet showing among the green. A thick clump of dogwood, whose large white blossoms could easily pass for magnolias, gave background. The green was lit with showy colour of every sort,—handfuls of nasturtiums, now and then a peony, larkspurs for blue, patches of poppies, and in the garden-vases high on the pillars (the imposition!) clusters of pink hollyhocks which were meant to pass for oleander-blossoms, and did, still, wet with the drops of the afternoon shower, which had not dried away when all was in place. When it comes to rain and dewdrops, dear Dr. Holmes, a "fresh-water college" has an advantage. First, it was given under gas; then, the hall being darkened, a magnesium-light gave a moon-like radiance, in which the dew on the buds glistened, and the mignonette seemed to exhale a double perfume, and a dreamy melody of Mendelssohn sung by two sweet girl-voices floated out about the "pleached bower," like a song of nightingales. Then toward the end came the scene of the chapel and Hero's tomb. No lovelier form was ever sculptured than that of the beautiful Queen Louisa of Prussia, as she lies in the mausoleum at Charlottenburg, carved by Rauch, asleep on the tomb in white purity. To the eye, our Hero's tomb was just such a block of spotless marble seen against a background of black, with just such a fair figure recumbent upon it, whose palms and lids and draping the chisel of an artist seemed to have folded and closed and hung,—all idealised again by the magic of the magnesium-light. As the crimson curtain was drawn apart, an organ sounded, and a far-away choir sent into the hush the Ave Verum of Mozart, low-breathed and solemn.
It was not Munich, Fastidiosus. They were American young men and young women, with no resources but those of a rural college, and such as their own taste and the woods and gardens could furnish; but the young men were shapely and intelligent, and the young women had grace and brightness; their hearts were in it, and in the result surely there was a measure of "sweetness and light" for them and those who beheld.
You fear it may beget in young minds a taste for the theatre, now hopelessly given over in great part to abominations. Why not a taste that will lift them above the abominations? Old Joachim Greff, schoolmaster at Dessau in 1545, who has a place in the history of German poetry, has left it on record that he trained his scholars to render noble dramas in the conscientious hope "that a little spark of art might be kept alive in the schools under the ashes of barbarism." "And this little spark," says Gervinus, "did these bold men, indeed, through two hundred years, keep honestly until it could again break out into flame." Instead of fearing the evil result, rather would I welcome a revival of what Warton calls "this very liberal exercise." Were Joachim Greffs masters in our high schools and in the English chairs in our colleges, we might now and then catch a glimpse of precious things at present hidden away in never-opened store-houses, and see something done toward the development of a taste that should drive out the opera-bouffe .
Here, at the end, Fastidiosus, is what I now shape in mind. Hippolyte Taine, in one of his rich descriptions, thus pictures the performance of a masque:
The élite of the kingdom is there upon the stage, the ladies of the court, the great lords, the queen, in all the splendour of their rank and their pride, in diamonds, earnest to display their luxury so that all the brilliant features of the nation's life are concentrated in the price they give, like gems in a casket. What adornment! What profusion of magnificence! What variety! What metamorphoses! Gold sparkles, jewels emit light, the purple draping imprisons within its rich folds the radiance of the lustres. The light is reflected from shining silk. Threads of pearl are spread in rows upon brocades sewed with thread of silver. Golden embroideries intertwine in capricious arabesques, costumes, jewels, appointments so extraordinarily rich that the stage seems a mine of glory.
The fashionable world of our time has little taste for such pleasures. This old splendour we cannot produce; but the words which the magnificent lords and ladies spoke to one another as they blazed, were those that make up the Poetry of Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess , Ben Jonson's Sad Shepherd , and, finest of all, the Comus of Milton. They are the most matchless frames of language in which sweet thoughts and fancies were ever set. After all, before this higher beauty, royal pomp even seems only a coarse excrescence, and all would be better if the accessories of the rendering were very simple. Already in my mind is the grove for Comus designed; the mass of green which shall stand in the centre, the blasted trunk that shall rise for contrast to one side, and the vine that shall half conceal the splintered summit, the banks of wild-flowers that shall be transferred, the light the laboratory shall yield us to make all seem as if seen through enchanter's incense. I have in mind the sweet-voiced girl who shall be the lost lady and sing the invocation to Sabrina; the swart youth who shall be the magician and say the lines,
"At every fall, smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled";
and the golden-haired maid who shall glide in and out in silvery attire, as the attendant spirit. Come, Fastidiosus,—I shall invite too the editors of David's Harp ,—and you shall all own the truth of Milton's own words, "that sanctity and virtue and truth herself may in this wise be elegantly dressed," when the attendant spirit recites:
"Now my task is smoothly done,
I can fly or I can run
Quickly to the green earth's end,
Where the bowed welkin low doth bend;
And from thence can soar as soon
To the corners of the moon.
Mortals that would follow me,
Love virtue; she alone is free,
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or if virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her."
In January of 1870, having decided to teach rather than preach, I embarked for Germany to enjoy a year of foreign study. Like Western professors in general (to borrow the witticism of President Eliot) I occupied not so much a chair as a sofa, and felt that I needed enlargement for the performance of my functions.
I think I saw a certain caricature first in Munich at the end of July, then in two or three Swiss cities, then in Paris at the end of August, then in Brussels and London; for it was popular, and the print-shops had it everywhere. It was a map of Europe where the different countries were represented by comical figures, each meant to hit off the peculiarities of the nation it stood for, according to popular apprehension. For Prussia there was an immense giant, one of whose knees was on the stomach of Austria represented as a lank figure utterly prostrate, while the other foot threatened to crush South-western Germany. One hand menaced France, whose outline the designer had managed to give rudely in the figure of a Zouave in a fierce attitude; and the other was thrust toward Russia, a huge colossus with Calmuck dress, and features. The most conspicuous thing in the giant's dress was a helmet with a spike projecting from the top, much too large for the head of the wearer, and therefore falling over his eyes until they were almost blinded by it. The style of the helmet was that of the usual head-dress of the Prussian soldier. The caricature generally was not bad, and the hit at Prussia, half crushed and blinded under the big helmet, was particularly good. Throughout her whole history Prussia is either at war, or getting ready for war, or lying exhausted through wounds and recovering strength. In Prussia you found things of pugnacious suggestion always, and in the most incongruous connections. Study the schools, and there was something to call up the soldier. Study the church, and even there was a burly polemic quality which you can trace back from to-day to the time when the Prussian bishops were fighting knights. Study the people in their quietest moods, in their homes, among their recreations, indeed, among the graves of those they honour as the greatest heroes, and you found the same overhanging shadow of war. This predominant martial quality showed itself in ways sometimes brutal, sometimes absurd, sometimes sublime.
I visited Prussia at a time of entire peace, for at my departure I crossed the frontier (or that of the North German Confederation, the whole of which, for convenience's sake, we will call Prussia) on the very day when King William was shouldering aside so roughly at Ems Benedetti and the famous French demands. The things to which I gave attention for the most part were the things which belong to peace; yet as I arrange my recollections I find that something military runs through the whole of them. As one's letters when he has read them are filed away on the pointed wire standing on the desk, so as regards my Prussian experiences everything seems to have been filed away on the spike of a helmet.
Going out early one May morning to get my first sight of Berlin, I stood presently in a broad avenue. In the centre ran a wide promenade lined with tall, full-foliaged trees, with a crowded roadway on each side bordered by stately buildings. Close by me a colossal equestrian statue in bronze towered up till the head of the rider was on a level with the eaves of the houses. The rider was in cocked hat, booted and spurred, the eye turned sharp to the left as if reconnoitring, the attitude alert, life-like, as if he might dismount any moment if he chose. In the distance down the long perspective of trees was a lofty gate supported by columns, with a figure of Victory on the top in a chariot drawn by horses. Close at hand again, under the porch of a square strong structure, stood two straight sentinels. An officer passed in a carriage on the farther side of the avenue. Instantly the two sentinels stepped back in concert as if the same clock-work regulated their movements, brought their shining pieces with perfect precision to the "present," stood for an instant as if hewn from stone, the spiked helmets above the blond faces inclining backward at the same angle, then precisely together fell into the old position. The street was "Unter den Linden." The tall statue was the memorial of Frederick the Great. The gate down the long vista was the Brandenburger Thor, surmounted by the charioted Victory which Napoleon carried to Paris after Jena and which came back after Waterloo. The solid building was the palace of iron-grey old King William; and when the clock-work sentinels went through their salute, I got my first sight of that famous Prussian discipline, against which before the summer was through supple France was to crush its teeth all to fragments, like a viper that has incautiously bitten at a file.
There never was a place with aspect more military than Berlin even in peaceful times. In many quarters towered great barracks for the troops. The public memorials were almost exclusively in honour of great soldiers. There were tall columns, too, to commemorate victories or the crushing out of revolutionary spirit; rarely, indeed, in comparison, a statue to a man of scientific or literary or artistic eminence. Frederick sits among the tree-tops of Unter den Linden, and about his pedestal are life-size figures of the men of his age whom Prussia holds most worthy of honour. At the four corners ride the Duke of Brunswick and cunning Prince Heinrich, old Ziethen and fiery Seydlitz. Between are a score or more of soldiers of lesser note, only soldiers, spurred and sabre-girt,—except at the very back; and there, just where the tail of Frederick's horse droops over, stand—whom think you?—no others than Leasing, critic and poet, most gifted and famous; and Kant, peer of Plato and Bacon, one of the most gifted brains of all time. Just standing room for them among the hoofs and uniforms at the tail of Frederick's horse! Every third man one met in Berlin was a soldier off duty. Batteries of steel guns rolled by at any time, obedient to their bugles. Squadrons of Uhlans in uniforms of green and red, the pennons fluttering from the ends of their lances, rode up to salute the king. Each day at noon, through the roar of the streets, swelled the finest martial music; first a grand sound of trumpets, then a deafening roll from a score of brazen drums. A heavy detachment of infantry wheeled out from some barracks, ranks of strong brown-haired young men stretching from sidewalk to sidewalk, neat in every thread and accoutrement, with the German gift for music all, as the stride told with which they beat out upon the pavement the rhythm of the march, dropping sections at intervals to do the unbroken guard duty at the various posts. Frequently whole army corps gathered to manoeuvre at the vast parade-ground by the Kreuzberg in the outskirts. On Unter den Linden is a strong square building, erected, after the model of a Roman fortress, to be the quarters of the main guard. The officers on duty at Berlin came here daily at noon to hear military music and for a half-hour's talk. They came always in full uniform, a collection of the most brilliant colours, hussars in red, blue, green, and black, the king's body-guard in white with braid of yellow and silver, in helmets that flashed as if made from burnished gold, crested with an eagle with out-spread wings. The men themselves were the handsomest one can see; figures of the finest symmetry and stature, trained by every athletic exercise, and the faces often so young and beautiful! Counts and barons were there from Pomerania and old Brandenburg, where the Prussian spirit is most intense, and no nobility is nobler or prouder. They were blue-eyed and fair-haired descendants perhaps of the chieftains that helped Herman overcome Varus, and whose names may be found five hundred years back among the Deutsch Ritters that conquered Northern Europe from heathendom, and thence all the way down to now, occurring in martial and princely connection. It was the acme of martial splendour.
"But how do you bear it all?" you say to your Prussian friend, with whom you stand looking on at the base of Billow's statue. "Is not this enormous preparation for bloodshed something dreadful? Then the tax on the country to support it all, the withdrawing of such a multitude from the employments of peace." Your friend, who had been a soldier himself, would answer: "We bear it because we must. It is the price of our existence, and we have got used to it; and, after all, with the hardship come great benefits. Every able-bodied young Prussian must serve as a soldier, be he noble or low-born, rich or poor. If he cannot read or write, he must learn. He must be punctual, neat, temperate, and so gets valuable habits. His body is trained to be strong and supple. Shoemaker and banker's son, count, tailor, and farmer march together, and community of feeling comes about. The great traditions of Prussian history are the atmosphere they breathe, and they become patriotic. The soldier must put off marrying, perhaps half forget his trade, and come into life poor; for who can save on nine cents a day, with board and clothes? But it is a wonder if he is not a healthy, well-trained, patriotic man." So talked your Prussian; and however much of a peace-man you might be, you could not help owning there was some truth in it. If you bought a suit of clothes, the tailor jumped up from his cross-legged position, prompt and full-chested, with tan on his face he got in campaigning; and it is hard to say he had lost more than he gained in his army training. If you went into a school, the teacher, with a close-clipped beard and vigorous gait, who had a scar on his face from Königgrätz, seemed none the worse for it, though he might have read a few books the less and lost his student pallor. At any rate, bad or good, so it was; and so, said the Prussian, it must be. Eternal vigilance and preparation! I went in one day to the arsenal. The flags which Prussian armies had taken from almost every nation in Europe were ranged against the walls by the hundred; shot-shattered rags of silk, white standards of Austria embroidered with gold, Bavaria's blue checker, above all the great Napoleonic symbol, the N surrounded by its wreath. This was the memorable tapestry that hung the walls, and opposite glittered the waiting barrels and bayonets till one could almost believe them conscious, and burning to do as much as the flintlocks that won the standards. There was a needle-gun there or somewhere for every able-bodied man, and somewhere else uniform and equipments. When I landed in February on the bank of the Weser, the most prominent object was the redoubt with the North German flag. When in midsummer I crossed the Bavarian frontier among a softer people, the last marked object was the old stronghold of Coburg, battered by siege after siege for a thousand years. It was the spiked helmet at the entrance and again at the exit; and from entrance to exit, few places or times were free from some martial suggestion. It was a nation that had come to power mainly through war, and been schooled into the belief that its mailed fists alone could guarantee its life.
I visited a primary school. The little boys of six came with knapsacks strapped to their backs for their books and dinners, instead of satchels. At the tap of a bell they formed themselves into column and marched like little veterans to the schoolroom door. I visited a school for boys of thirteen or fourteen. Casting my eyes into the yard, I saw the spiked helmet in the shape of the half-military manoeuvres of a class which the teacher of gymnastics was training for the severer drill of five or six years later. I visited the "prima," or upper class of a gymnasium, and here was the spiked helmet in a connection that seemed at first rather irreverent. After all, however, it was only thoroughly Prussian, and deserved to be looked upon as a comical incongruity rather than gravely blamed. A row of cheap pictures hung side by side upon the wall. First Luther, the rougher characteristics of the well-known portrait somewhat exaggerated. The shoulders were even larger than common. The bony buttresses of the forehead over the eyes, too, as they rose above the strong lower face, were emphasised, looking truly as though, if tongue and pen failed to make a way, the shoulders could push one, and, if worse came to worst, the head would butt one. Next to Luther was a head of Christ; then in the same line, with nothing in the position or quality of the pictures to indicate that the subjects were any less esteemed, a row of royal personages, whose military trappings were made particularly plain. It was all characteristic enough. The Reformer's figure stood for the stalwart Protestantism of the Prussian character, still living and militant in a way hard for us to imagine; the portraits of the royal soldiers stood for its combative loyalty, ready to meet anything for king and fatherland; and the head of Christ for its zealous faith, which, however it may have cooled away among some classes of the people, was still intense in the nation at large. I visited the best school for girls in Berlin, and it was singular to find the spiked helmet, among those retiring maidens even, and this time not hung upon the wall nor outside in the yard. The teacher of the most interesting class I visited—a class in German literature—was a man of forty-five, of straight, soldierly bearing, a grey, martial moustache, and energetic eye. He told me, as we walked together in the hall, waiting for the exercise to commence, that he had been a soldier, and it so happened that among the ballads in the lesson for that day was one in honour of the Prussian troops at Rossbach. Over this the old soldier broke out into an animated lecture, which grew more and more earnest as he went forward; he showed how the idea of faithfulness to duty had become obscured, but was enforced again by the philosopher Kant in his teaching, and then brought into practice by the great Frederick. The veteran plainly thought there was no duty higher than that owed to the schwarzer Adler , the black eagle of Prussia. Then came an account of the French horse before Rossbach; how they rode out from Weimar, the troopers, before they went, ripping open the beds on which they had slept and scattering the feathers to the wind to plague the housewives,—a piece of ruthlessness that came home thoroughly to the young housekeepers; then how der alte Fritz , lying in wait behind Janus Hill, with General Seydlitz and Field-marshal Keith, suddenly rushed out and put them all to rout. The soldier was in a fever of patriotism and rage against the French before his description was finished, and the faces of the girls kindled in response. "They will some time," I thought, "be lovers, wives, mothers of Prussian soldiers themselves, and this training will keep alive in the home the national fire."
Admirable schools they all were, the presence of the spiked helmet notwithstanding, and crowning them in the great Prussian educational system came the famous universities. That at Berlin counted its students by thousands, its professors by hundreds. There was no branch of human knowledge without its teacher. One could study Egyptian hieroglyphics or the Assyrian arrow-head inscriptions. A new pimple could hardly break out on the blotched face of the moon, without a lecture from a professor next day to explain the theory of its development. The poor earthquakes were hardly left to shake in peace an out-of-the-way strip of South American coast or Calabrian plain, but a German professor violated their privacy, undertook to see whence they came and whither they went, and even tried to predict when they would go to shaking again. The vast building of the University stood on Unter den Linden, opposite the palace of the king. Large as it was, its halls were crowded at the end of every hour by the thousand or two of young men, who presently disappeared within the lecture-rooms. Here in past years had been Hegel and Fichte, the brothers Grimm, the brothers Humboldt, Niebuhr, and Carl Ritter. Here in my time, were Lepsius and Curtius, Virchow and Hoffman, Ranke and Mommsen,—the world's first scholars in the past and present. The student selected his lecturers, then went day by day through the semester to the plain lecture-rooms, taking notes diligently at benches which had been whittled well by his predecessors, and where he too most likely carved his own autograph and perhaps the name of the dear girl he adored,—for Yankee boys have no monopoly of the jack-knife.
Where could one find the spiked helmet in the midst of the scholastic quiet and diligence of a German university? It was visible enough in more ways than one. Here was one manifestation. Run down the long list of professors and teachers in the Anzeiger , and you would find somewhere in the list the Fechtmeister , instructor in fighting, master of the sword exercise, and he was pretty sure to be one of the busiest men in the company. To most German students, a sword, or Schläger , was as necessary as pipe or beer-mug; not a slender fencing-foil, with a button on the point, and slight enough to snap with a vigorous thrust, but a stout blade of tempered steel, ground sharp. With these weapons the students perpetrated savageries, almost unrebuked, which struck an American with horror. Duels were of frequent occurrence, taking place sometimes at places and on days regularly set apart for the really bloody work. The fighters were partially protected by a sort of armour, and the wounds inflicted were generally more ghastly than dangerous; though a son of Bismarck was said to have been nearly killed at Bonn a few years before, and there was sometimes serious maiming. Perhaps one may say it was nothing but very rough play, but it was the play of young savages, whose sport was nothing to them without a dash of cruel rage. The practice dates from the time when the Germans wore wolf-skins, and were barbarians roaring in their woods. Perhaps the university authorities found it too inveterate a thing to be done away with; perhaps, too, they felt, thinking as it were under their spiked helmets, that after all it had a value, making the young men cool in danger and accustoming them to weapons. We, after all, cannot say too much. Often our young American students in Germany take to the Schläger as gracefully and naturally as game-cocks to spurs. The most noted duellist at one of the universities that winter was a burly young Westerner, who had things at first all his own way. A still burlier Prussian from Tübingen, however, appeared at last, and so carved our valiant borderer's face, that thereafter with its criss-cross scars it looked like a well-frequented skating-ground. Football, too, in America probably kills and maims more in a year than all the German duels.
To crown all, the schools and University at Berlin were magnificently supplemented in the great Museum, a vast collection, where one might study the rise and progress of civilisation in every race of past ages that has had a history, the present condition of perhaps every people, civilised or wild, under the sun. In one great hall you were among the satin garments and lacquered furniture of China; in another there was the seal-skin work of the Esquimaux stitched with sinew. Now you sat in a Tartar tent, now among the war-clubs, the conch-shell trumpets, the drums covered with human skin of the Polynesians. Here it was the feathery finery of the Caribs, here the idols and trinkets of the negroes of Soudan. There too, in still other halls, was the history of our own race; the maces the Teutons and Norsemen fought with, the torcs of twisted gold they wore about their necks, the sacrificial knives that slew the victims on the altars of Odin; so, too, what our fathers have carved and spun, moulded, cast, and portrayed, until we took up the task of life. In another place you found the great collection made in Egypt by Lepsius. The visitor stood within the facsimile of a temple on the banks of the Nile. On the walls and lotus-shaped columns were processions of dark figures at the loom, at the work of irrigation, marching as soldiers, or mourners at funerals,—exact copies of the original delineations. There were sphinx and obelisk, coffins of kings, mummies of priest and chieftain, the fabrics they wore, the gems they cut, the scrolls they engrossed, the tomb in which they were buried. Stepping into another section, you were in Assyria, with the alabaster lions and plumed genii of the men of Nineveh and Babylon. The walls again were brilliant, now with the splendour of the palaces of Nebuchadnezzar; the captives building temples, the chivalry sacking cities, the princes on their thrones. Here too was Etruria revealed in her sculpture and painted vases; and here too the whole story of Greece. Passing through these wonderful halls, you reviewed a thousand years and more, almost from the epoch of Cadmus, through the vicissitudes of empire and servitude, until Constantinople was sacked by the Turks. The rude Pelasgic altar, the sculptured god of Praxiteles, then down through the ages of decay to the ugly painting of the Byzantine monk in the Dark Ages. So too the whole history of Rome; the long heave of the wave from Romulus until it becomes crested with the might and beauty of the Augustan age; the sad subsidence from that summit to Goth and Hun. There was architecture which the eyes of the Tarquins saw, there were statues of the great consuls of the Republic, the luxury of the later Empire. You saw it not only in models, but sometimes in actual relics. One's blood thrilled when he stood before a statue of Julius Caesar, whose sculptor, it is reasonable to believe, wrought from the life. It was broken and discoloured, as it came from the Italian ruin where it had lain since the barbarian raids. But the grace had not left the toga folded across the breast, nor was the fine Roman majesty gone from the head and face,—a head small, but high, with a full and ample brow, a nose with the true eagle curve, and thin, firm lips formed to command; a statue most subduing in its simple dignity and pathetic in its partial ruin. And all this was free to the world as the air of heaven almost. No fee for admission; the only requisitions, not to handle, orderly behaviour, and decent neatness in attire. Here I saw too, when I ascended the steps between the great bronze groups of statuary as I entered, and again the last thing as I left, the spiked helmet on the head of the stiff sentinel always posted at the door.
The German home was affectionate and genial. The American, properly introduced, was sure of a generous welcome, for it was hard to find a German who had not many relatives beyond the Atlantic. There were courteous observances which at first put one a little aback. Sneezing, for instance, was not a thing that could be done in a corner. If the family were a bit old-fashioned, you would be startled and abashed by hearing the " prosits " and " Gesundheits " from the company, wishes that it might be for your advantage and health sonorously given, with much friendly nodding in your direction. This is a curious survival of an old superstition that sneezing perhaps opened a passage through which an evil spirit might enter the body. As you rose from the table it was the old-fashioned way, too, to go through with a general hand-shaking, and a wish to every one that the supper might set well. The Germans are long-lived, and almost every domestic hearthstone supports the easy-chairs of grandparents. Grandfather was often fresh and cheerful, the oracle and comforter of the children, treated with deference by those grown up, and presented to the guest as the central figure of the home. As the younger ones dropped off to bed and things grew quieter, grandfather's chair was apt to be the centre toward which all tended, and, of course, the old man talked about his youth. Here are the reminiscences I heard once at the end of a merry evening, and at other times I heard something not unlike: "Children and grandchildren and guest from over the sea, when I was a boy, Prussia was struggling with the first Napoleon; and when I was eighteen I marched myself under Blücher beyond the Rhine. Sometimes we went on the run, sometimes we got lifts in relays of waggons, and so I have known the infantry even to make now and then fifty miles a day. Matters were pressing, you see ( sehen Sie 'mal ). At last we crossed at Coblentz, and got from there into Belgium the first days of June. We met the French at Ligny,—a close, bitter fight,—and half my battalion were left behind there where they had stood. We were a few paces off, posted in a graveyard, when the French cavalry rode over old Marshal Vorwärts, lying under his horse. I saw the rush of the French, then the countercharge of the Prussian troopers when missed the General and drove the enemy back till they found him again; though what it all meant we never knew till it was over. Then, after mighty little rest, we marched fast and far, with cannon-thunder in our ears in a constant mutter, always growing louder, until in the afternoon we came at a quickstep through a piece of woods out upon the plain by Waterloo, where they had been fighting all day. Our feet sucked in the damp ground, the wet grain brushed our knees, as our compact column spread out into more open order and went into fire. What a smoke there was about La Haye Sainte and Hougomont, with now lines of red infantry, or a column in dark blue, or a mass of flashing cuirassiers hidden for a moment, then reappearing! It was take and give, hot and heavy, for an hour or so about Planchenoit. A ball grazed my elbow and another went through my cap; but at sunset the French were broken, and we swept after the rout as well as we could through the litter, along the southward roads. We were at a halt for a minute, I remember, when a rider in a chapeau with a plume, and a hooked nose underneath, trotted up, wrapped in a military cloak, and somebody said it was Wellington." Grandfather was sure to be at a white heat before he had finished, and so, too, his audience. The athletic student grandson, with a deep scar across his cheek from a Schläger cut, rose and paced the room. The Fräulien , his sister, to whom the retired grenadier has told the story of the feather-beds at Weimar, showed in her eves she remembered it all. "Yes, friend American!" breaks in the father of the family, "and it all must be done over again. Sooner or later it must come, a great struggle with France; the Latin race or the Teutonic, which shall be supreme in Europe? We are ready now; arsenals filled, horses waiting, equipments for everybody. Son Fritz there has his uniform ready, and somewhere there is one for me. Donnerwetter ! If they get into Prussia, they'll find a tough old Landsturm ! Only let Vater Wilhelm turn his hand, and to-morrow close upon a million trained and well-armed troops could be stepping to the drum." It was an evening at the end of June. Napoleon was having the finishing touches put to the new Opera House at Paris, thinking, so far as the world could tell, of nothing more important than how many imperial eagles it would do to put along the cornice. King William was packing for Ems, designing to be back at the peaceful unveiling of his father's statue the first week in August. Bismarck was at his Pomeranian estate, in poor health, it was said, plotting nothing but to circumvent his bodily trouble. In less than a month full-armed Prussia was on the march. I could understand the readiness, when I thought of the spiked helmet I had seen in the Prussian home that quiet summer night.
The German Friedhof , or burying-ground, had never the extent or magnificence of some American cemeteries. Even near the cities it was small and quiet, showing, however, in the well-kept mounds and stones there was no want of care. Every old church, too, was floored with the memorial tablets of those buried beneath, and bare upon walls and columns monuments in the taste of the various ages that have come and gone since the church was built. Graves of famous men, here as everywhere, were places of pilgrimage, and here as everywhere to see which are the most honoured tombs, was no bad way of judging the character of the people. Among the scholars of Germany there have been no greater names than those of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, brothers not far apart in the cradle, not far apart in death, who lived and worked together their full threescore years and ten. They were two wonderful old men, with faces—as I saw them together in a photograph shown me by Hermann Grimm, the well-known son of Wilhelm—full of intellectual strength, and yet with the sweetness and innocence of children. They lie now side by side in the Matthäi Kirchhof at Berlin, in graves precisely similar, with a lovely rose-bush scattering petals impartially on the turf above both, and solid twin stones at their heads, meant to endure apparently as long as their fame. Hither come a large and various company of pilgrims,—children who love the brothers Grimm for their fairy-tales, young students who have been kindled by their example, and grey old scholars who respect their achievements as the most marvellous work of the marvellous German erudition. The little North German city, Weimar, is closely associated with the great literary men of the last hundred years. Here several of them accomplished their best work under the patronage of an enlightened duke, and finally found their graves. An atmosphere of reverend quiet seemed to hang over it as I walked through its shaded streets,—streets where there is never bustle, and which appear to be always remembering the great men who have walked in them. In the burying-ground in the outskirts I found the mausoleum of the ruling house, a decorated hall of marble with a crypt underneath in which are the coffins. The members of the Saxe-Weimar family for many generations are here; the warlike ancestor with his armour rusting on the dusty lid, grand-duke and duchess, and the child that died before it attained the coronet. But far more interesting than any of these are two large plain caskets of oak, lying side by side at the foot of the staircase by which you descend. In these are the bones of Goethe and Schiller. The heap of wreaths, some of them still fresh, which lay on the tops, the number on the coffin of Schiller being noticeably the larger, showed how green their memory had been kept in the heart of the nation. I was only one of a great multitude of pilgrims who are coming always, their chief errand being to see the graves of these famous dead within the quiet town. In the side of the Schloss Kirche, in the city of Wittenberg, is an old archway, with pillars carved as if twisted and with figures of saints overhead, the sharpness of the cutting being somewhat broken and worn away through time. It is the doorway which rang loud three hundred years ago to the sound of Luther's hammer as he nailed up his ninety-five theses. Within the church, about midway toward the altar and near the wall, the guide lifts an oaken trap-door and shows you, beneath, the slab which covers Luther's ashes. Just opposite, in a sepulchre precisely similar, lies Melancthon, and in the chancel near by, in tombs rather more stately, the electors of Saxony that befriended the reformers. A spot worthy indeed to be a place of pilgrimage! attracting not only those who bless the men, but those who curse them. Charles V. and Alva stood once on the pavement where the visitor now stands, and the Emperor commanded the stone to be removed from the grave of Luther. Did the body turn in its coffin at the violation? It might well have been so, for never was there fiercer hate. For three centuries the generations have trooped hitherward, more often drawn in reverence, but sometimes through very hatred, a multitude too mighty to be numbered. But there is a grave in Prussia, where, if I mistake not, the pilgrims are more numerous and the interest, for the average Prussian, deeper than scholar or poet or reformer call out. The garrison church at Potsdam has a plain name and is a plain edifice, when one thinks of the sepulchre it holds. Hung upon the walls are dusty trophies; there are few embellishments besides. You make your way through the aisles among the pews where the regiments sit at service, marching from their barracks close by, then through a door beneath the pulpit enter a vault lighted by tapers along the wall. Two heavy coffins stand on the stone floor,—the older one that of Frederick William I., that despot, partially insane, perhaps, who yet accomplished great things for Prussia; the other that of his famous son, Frederick the Great, whose sword cut the path by which Prussia advanced to her vast power. On the copper lid formerly lay that sword, until the great Napoleon when he stood there, feeling a twinge of jealousy perhaps over the dead leader's fame, carried it away with him. Father and son lie quietly enough now side by side, though their relations in life were stormy. About the great soldier's sleep every hour rolls the drumbeat from the garrison close by. The tramp of the columns as they come in to worship jar the warrior's ashes. The dusky standards captured in the Seven Years' War droop about him. The hundred intervening years have blackened them, already singed in the fire of Zorndorf, Leuthen, and Torgau. The moth makes still larger the rent where the volleys passed. The spiked helmet is even here among the tombs; and schooled as the Prussians are among the din of trumpets and smoke of wars, no other among the mighty graves in their land holds dust, in their thought, so heroic.
Seven hundred years ago Frederick's ancestor Conrad, the younger son of a family of some rank, but quite undistinguished, riding down from the little stronghold of Hohenzollern in Swabia, with nothing but a good head and arm, won favour with the Emperor Barbarossa and became at last Burggraf of Nuremberg. I saw the old castle in which this Conrad lived and his line after him for several generations. It rises among fortifications the plan for which Albert Dürer drew, with narrow windows in the thick masonry of the towers, the battlements worn by the pacing to and fro of sentinels in armour, and an ancient linden in the court-yard, planted by an empress a thousand years ago it is said, with as green a canopy to throw over the tourist to-day as it threw over those old Hohenzollerns. Conrad transmitted to his descendants his good head and strong arm, until at length becoming masters of Baireuth and Anspach, they were Margraves and ranked among important princes. Their seat now was at Culmbach, in the great castle of the Plessenburg. I saw one May morning the grey walls of the old nest high on its cliff at the junction of the red and white Main, threatening still, for it is now a Bavarian prison. The power of the house grew slowly. In one age it got Brandenburg, in another the great districts of Ost and West Preussen; now it was possessions in Silesia, now again territory on the Rhine. Power came sometimes through imperial gift, sometimes through marriage, sometimes through purchase or diplomacy or blows. From poor soldiers of fortune to counts, from counts to princes, from princes to electors, and at last kings. Sometimes they are unscrupulous, sometimes feeble, sometimes nobly heroic and faithful; more often strong than weak in brain and hand. The Hohenzollern tortoise keeps creeping forward in its history, surpassing many a swift hare that once despised it in the race. I believe it is the oldest princely line in Europe. There is certainly none whose history on the whole is better. Margraf George of Anspach-Baireuth was perhaps the finest character among the Protestant princes of the Reformation, without whom the good fight could not have been fought. When Charles V. besieged Metz in the winter (which, with Lorraine, had just been torn from Germany by the French), and was compelled by the cold to withdraw, it was a Hohenzollern prince, one of the first soldiers of the time, who led the rear-guard over ground which another Hohenzollern, Prince Frederick Charles, has again made famous. Later, in Frederick the Great, the house furnished one of the firmest hands that ever held a royal sceptre. His successors have been men of power.
They are good types of their stock, and Prussia is worthy of the leadership to which she is advancing. In the cathedral of Speyer stand the statues of the mighty German Kaisers, who six hundred years ago wore the purple, and, after their wild battle with the elements of disorder about them, were buried at last in its crypts. They are majestic figures for the most part, idealised by the sculptor, and yet probably not far beyond nature; for the imperial dignity was not hereditary, but given to the man chosen for it, and the choice was often a worthy one. They were leaders in character as well as station, and it is right to give their images the bearing of men strong in war and council. I felt that if the ancient dignity was to be revived in our own day, and the sceptre of Barbarossa and Rudolph of Hapsburg to be extended again over a united Germany, there had been few princes more worthy to hold it than the modern Hohenzollern.
In speaking of this great people so as to give the best idea of them in a short space, I have seized on what seemed to me in those days the most salient thing, and described various phases of their life as pervaded by it. The fighting spirit was bred in their bones. They were a nation of warriors almost as much as the Spartans, and stood ready on the instant to obey the tap of the drum calling to arms. Such constant suggestions of war were painful. The spiked helmet is never an amiable head-dress; "but," said the representative Prussian, "there is no help for it. We have been a weak people wedged in between powerful unscrupulous neighbours, and have had a life-and-death struggle to wage almost constantly with one or the other of these, or all at once. And in what way is our situation different now? Is Russia less ambitious? How many swords has France beaten into ploughshares? What pruning-hooks have been made from the spears of Austria? Let us know on what conditions we can live other than wearing our spiked helmets, and we will embrace them." It was not an easy matter to argue down your resolute Prussian when he turned to you warmly, after you had been crying peace to him.
As I pondered, I thought perhaps it is a necessity, since the world is what it is, that Europe should still be a place of discord. America, however, is practically one, not a jarring company of nations repeating the protracted agony of the Old World. We have no question of the "balance of power" coming up in every generation, settled only to be unsettled amid devastation and slaughter. We can grow forward unhindered, with hardly more than a feather's weight of energy taken for fighting from the employments of peace. America stands indeed a nation blessed of God; and there is nothing better worth her while to pray for than that a happier time may come to her giant brother over the sea; that the strength of such an arm may not always waste itself wielding the sword; that the sensibilities of such a heart may not be crushed or brutalised in carnage that forever repeats itself; that the noble head may some time exchange the spiked helmet for the olive chaplet of peace.
We rememberers lie under certain suspicion. "Uncle Mose," said an inquirer, his intonation betraying scepticism, "they say you remember General Washington." "Yaas, Boss," replied Uncle Mose, "I used to 'member Gen'l Washington, but sence I jined de church I done forgot." Not having joined Uncle Mose's church, my memory has not experienced the ecclesiastical discouragement that befell him. I humbly trust, however, it needs no chastening, and aver that I do not go for my facts to my imagination. I am now in foreign parts dealing with personages of especial dignity and splendour and must establish my memory firmly in the reader's confidence.
I was a student in Germany in 1870. In the spring at Berlin, passing by the not very conspicuous royal palace on Unter den Linden, one day I studied the front with some interest. The two sentinels stood in the door saluting with clock-work precision the officers who frequently passed. A watchful policeman was on the corner, but there was little other sign that an important personage was within the walls. With some shock I suddenly caught sight, in a window close at hand, of a tall, robust figure with a rugged but not ungenial face surmounted by grizzled hair, in uniform with decorations hanging upon the broad breast, who, as I glanced up, saluted me with an unlooked-for nod. I knew at once it was the King of Prussia, who before the year was ended was to be crowned as Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse at Versailles. I was thoroughly scared, as I did not know that it was the habit of the King to stand in the window and good-naturedly greet the passer-by.
That was my first sight of a real king. But there is another figure which I contemplate with more interest. The 31st of May of 1870 was a day sent from heaven, brilliant sunshine after a period of cloud; the spring lording it in the air, the trees and grass in their freshest luxuriance. I was at Potsdam that day; in the wide-stretching gardens that surround the New Palace. As I walked, I came to a cord drawn across the path, indicating that visitors were to go no farther. Close by stood a tall young grenadier on duty as a sentinel, but willing to chat. Looking beyond the cord into the reserved space I presently saw coming up from a secluded path, a low carriage drawn by a pony led by a groom in which was seated a lady dressed in white. She was not of distinguished appearance but my grenadier told me that it was the Crown Princess of Prussia, the daughter of the Queen of England. From the screen of the bush I watched her with natural interest. The carriage paused and a group of little boys and girls came running out from the thicket attended by a governess or two and a tutor. The little girls had their hands full of flowers, which, running forward, they threw into the carriage. The boys, too, ran up with pretty demonstrations, and a straight little fellow of ten years or so hurried to the groom and began to pat the pony's nose. These, I learned, were the princes and princesses of the royal family. The little fellow patting the pony's nose was the eldest and destined to emerge into history as Kaiser Wilhelm the Second.
And now, from a door of the palace, not far distant, came striding a notable figure, tall and stalwart, in the undress uniform of a Prussian General. Under his fatigue cap the blond hair was abundant; a wave of brown beard swept flown upon his breast. The face was full of intelligence and authority, but at that moment most kindly as his blue eyes sought the group that stood in the foreground. It was the Crown Prince of Prussia, destined at length to be the Emperor Friedrich. The carriage passed on, the Crown Prince walking, with his hand on the side, while the Princess held her parasol over his head, laughing at the idea evidently, that so sturdy a soldier needed that kind of a screen.
The Crown Prince Friedrich was unpopular in those days as too domestic, standing too much withdrawn from the bustling world, but there was no failure when the stress came. Only a few weeks passed before the stout soldier, whom I had seen throwing lilies and sheltered from the sun by his wife's parasol, was at the head of a great army corps, crushing the power of France at Worth and Weissembourg; but the report was that he had said, "I do not like war, and if I am ever King I shall never make war."
A few weeks after the Potsdam incident I was in the city of Vienna. One morning, like thunder out of a clear sky, news came of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. I read the paper, but, not feeling that the news need interfere with my sight-seeing, went to the Hofbourg, the old palace, in the heart of the city, of the Imperial family of Austria. The building is extensive; the streets of the city at that time running under it here and there in tunnels. I visited the Schatz Kammer, the treasure-room, and saw men go almost demented at the spectacle of the gold and jewels heaped up in the cases. The sight of the splendour, the heaped-up jewels, the batons, the faded, and sometimes bloody, garments, the trinkets and decorations, associated with towering personalities of the past, attuned my spirit for some adventure above the commonplace. As I came down into the street, narrow and overhung by the confining arch, a soldier passed me on the run into an open space just beyond, where instantly a battalion hurried out to stand at present. Then in the distance I heard galloping of horses and an open carriage rapidly approached, in which were seated four figures, protected from the light rain by grey overcoats, wearing the chapeaux which have come down from Napoleonic times. The carriage passed so near that I was obliged to press back against the wall to save my feet from the wheels, and a figure on the back seat, who, for the moment, was within arm's reach, I recognised as Francis Joseph.
He was then a man in his best years, a strong, sensible if not impressive face, and a well-knit frame. He had driven in from Schönbrunn to attend a council meeting, and the day for him was no doubt a most critical one. War had come. It was only four years after Königgrätz. His old enemy, Prussia, was about to hurl herself, with who could tell what allies, against France. What stand should Austria take? If the Kaiser was agitated, his face did not show it; it was significant of quiet, cool poise. Excitement was repressed, while good sense weighed and determined. Few sovereigns have been obliged to face so often situations of the utmost difficulty. I can believe that with similar imperturbability Francis Joseph has confronted the series of perplexities which make up the tangled story of his long career, and I count it good fortune that I witnessed, in a moment of supreme embarrassment, the balance and resolution with which the good ruler went to his task. Austria, as the world knows, decided that day to be neutral in the Franco-Prussian quarrel.
The disorder in the land made me feel that I must get nearer to my base, so I hurriedly left Vienna for Munich, which I found seething with agitation, for, like Austria, Bavaria had only a few years before been Prussia's enemy, and so far as the populace was concerned all was in doubt as to what course would now be taken. The rumour was that McMahon had crossed the Rhine at Strassburg with 150,000 men, and was marching to interpose between Northern and Southern Germany.
At the Ober-Pollinger I heard in the inn, amid the stormy discussion of the crisis, something quite out of harmony with the spirit of the hour. The first performance was to be given in the Royal Opera House of a work of Richard Wagner, the Rheingold . Wagner in those days had not attained his great fame, and, to a man like me, who had no especial interest in music, was a name almost unknown, but I went with the crowd, thinking to help out a dreary evening rather than to enjoy a masterpiece. The house was crowded. In the centre before the stage an ample space was occupied by the royal box, richly carved and draped. Presently the King entered, a slender, graceful figure in a dress suit, his dark rather melancholy face looking handsome in the gorgeous setting of the theatre. The crowded audience rose to their feet in a tumult of enthusiasm. The air resounded with "Hoch! Hoch!" the German cheer, and handkerchiefs waved like a snow-storm. The King bowed right and left in acknowledgment of the plaudits, and the performance of the evening was kept long in waiting. The line of Bavarian kings has perhaps little title to our respect. The Ludwig of fifty years ago was a voluptuary, vacillating, like another Louis Quinze, between debauchery and a weak pietism. He probably merited the cuts of the relentless scourge of Heine than which no instrument of chastisement was ever more unsparing, and which in his case was put to its most merciless use; but he loved art and lavished his revenues upon pictures, statues, and churches, which the world admires, imparting a benefit, though his subjects groaned. His successor, whom I saw, was a man morbid and without force, who early came to a sorrowful end. His redeeming quality was a fine aesthetic taste, which he had no doubt through heredity, together with a sad burden of disease. The world remembers kindly that he was a prodigal patron of art.
I went to Heidelberg in February, 1870, bent upon a quiet year of study in Germany and France. Fate had a different programme for me. My plans were badly interfered with but to see Europe in such a turmoil was an experience well worth having. Heidelberg that spring was very peaceful. The ice in the Neckar on which skaters were disporting on my arrival passed out in due course of time to the Rhine, the foliage broke forth in glory on the noble hills and the nightingales came back to sing in the ivy about the storied ruins. There was no suggestion in the air of cannon thunder. At Berlin, however, as I have described, I found things wearing a warlike air. I was eager to perfect my German and sought chances to talk with all whom I met, and often had pleasant converse with the young soldiers who when off duty numerously flocked to the gardens and street corners. I recall in particular three young soldiers whose subsequent fate I should like to know. The first was a handsome young grenadier who had talked with me affably as we stood together screened by the bush in the garden of the New Palace at Potsdam watching the family of the Crown Prince, that beautiful forenoon in May…. When I told him I had myself mitgemacht the Civil War in America he at once accorded me respect as a veteran. I think he was a Freiwilliger , one of the class, who, having reached a high status in the Gymnasium, enjoyed the privilege of a shorter term of service. He had the bearing of a cultivated gentleman and there was strength in his firm young face which I have no doubt made him a good soldier in the time of stress. We shook hands at last in the friendliest way and I saw him no more. A few days later the train in which I was riding stopped at Erfurt and among the groups at the station was one that interested me much. In the centre stood a sturdy young Uhlan gaudy in full dress which I fancied he had only lately assumed, his stature was increased by his lofty horse-hair plume and he wore his corselet over a uniform in which there was many a dye. A bevy of pretty girls thronged around him, freshly beautiful after the German type, blond and blue-eyed in attractive summer draperies, and I speculated pleasantly as to which among them were sisters and which sweethearts. As the train departed the young Uhlan climbed into my compartment and we sat vis-à-vis as we rode on through the country. He was a frank ingenuous boy of twenty with eyes that danced with life, and a mobile play of features. My claim that I had seen service in the tented field again served me in good stead as an introduction; it was a passport to his confidence and I had a pleasant hour or two with him until he left me at length at his rendezvous.
Best of all I remember a third encounter. When I stepped from my car at Weimar I asked a direction from a young grenadier off duty who stood at hand on the platform. He too possessed the usual Teutonic vigour and strength. A conversation sprang up in which I explained that I was an American and desired to see as well as I could in a few hours the interesting things in that little city so quiet and renowned. I had found out by this time that my small veteranship was a good asset and paraded it for all it was worth and as usual it told. He was off duty for a few hours and had never visited the shrines of Weimar, and if I had no objection he would like to go with me on my tour of inspection, so together we walked through those shadowed streets, which seemed to be haunted even in that bright sunshine by the ghosts of the great men who have walked in them. We saw the homes of Goethe and Schiller, the noble statues of the Dichter-Paar , and the old theatre behind it in which were first performed the masterpieces of the German drama. We went together to the cemetery and descending into the crypt of the mausoleum stood by the coffins of Goethe and Schiller, the men most illustrious in German letters. It was a memorable day of my life, the outward conditions perfect, the June sunshine, the wealth of lovely foliage, the bird songs, and right at hand the homes and haunts of the inspired singers whom I especially reverenced. I was most fortunate in my companionship, the bearing of the youth was marked by no flippancy, he venerated as I did the lofty spirits into whose retreats we had penetrated. He was familiar with their masterpieces and we felt for them a like appreciation. His soldierly garb accorded perhaps ill with the peaceful suggestions of the hour and place, but in his mind plainly the sentiment lay deep, a warm recognition of what gave his country its best title to greatness. We took thought too of Wieland and looked in silence at the fine statue of Herder standing before the church in which he long ministered; but the supreme personages for us were Goethe and Schiller. What became of my sympathetic young soldier I have never known. If he escaped from Mars-la-Tour and Gravelotte and Sedan I am sure that he must have matured into a high-souled man.
I had an opportunity, during a visit to Strassburg in the spring, to see the soldiery of France. At the time the prestige of the Second Empire was at its height, Magenta and Solferino were considerable battles and the French had won them. Turcos and Zouaves had long passed in the world as soldiers of the best type and in our Civil War we had copied zealously their fantastic apparel and drill. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out the world felt that Germany had the hardest of nuts to crack and in many a mind the forecast was that France would be the victor, but even to my limited judgment the shortcomings of the French troops were plain. They were inferior in physique, lacking in trimness and even in cleanliness, and imperfectly disciplined. I wondered if the rather slovenly ill-trained battalions of small pale men could stand up against the prompt rigid alignment of the broad-shouldered six-footers I had seen manoeuvring on the other side of the Rhine.
I had received word in the spring from my bankers in Paris that my letter of credit was not in regular shape and they advised me to draw at Berlin a sum of money sufficient for present needs and transmit the letter to them, promising to adjust the matter in such a way that both they and I would be relieved of some inconvenience. In June I drew a small sum and sent my letter to Paris in accordance with their instructions, the agreement being that I was to call a month or so later on the correspondents at Munich of the Paris bankers and receive from them the corrected letter. I then travelled as far as Vienna where all unforeseen the news startled me of the outbreak of the war. I hurried to Munich, my little store of money being by that time much depleted. At the banking house I learned to my consternation that they had heard nothing of me or my letter of credit. Still worse, there was no prospect of hearing, communication with Paris was completely broken off. The rumour was that McMahon had crossed the Rhine at Strassburg with one hundred and fifty thousand men on the march to interpose between Southern and Northern Germany. The house had not heard from Paris and could not expect to hear. Acting on their advice I sent a distressful telegram roundabout through Switzerland to Paris. There was a possibility that such a message might go through; otherwise there was no hope. I then spent at Munich one of the most anxious weeks of my life. I was nearer the pavement than I have ever been before or since. There was a charming German family at the inn at which I stopped, gentle, courteous people, father, mother, and a little blue-eyed daughter. When the little girl found I was from America I can now see her innocent wide-open eyes as she asked me if I had ever seen an Indian. I could tell her some good stories of Indians for in boyhood I had lived near a reservation of Senecas, at that time to a large extent, in their primitive state. When I ventured one day to tell the polite father of my present embarrassment I at once noticed a sudden cooling off. The little girl no longer came to talk with me and the family held aloof. Plainly I had become an object of suspicion, I was now penniless, my story might be true or perhaps I was paving the way for asking a loan. How could he tell that I was not a dead-beat? I was really in a strait. The Americans had very generally left the city in consequence of the turmoil. I could hear of no one excepting our Consul who was still at his post. Calling upon him and telling my story, I found him cool to the point of rudeness. I had excellent letters from Bancroft and others which I showed him and which ought to have secured me a respectful hearing. I asked only for sympathy and counsel but I received neither, and could not have been treated worse if I had been a proved swindler. The Consul afterwards wrote a book in which he told of experiences with inconvenient countrymen who had recourse to him in their straits, and possibly I myself may have figured as one of his examples. My feeling is that he was a man not fit for his place, for in the circumstances he might certainly have shown some kindness. My few pieces of silver jingled drearily in my pocket; perhaps my best course would be to enlist in the German army. I thought the cause a just one for the atmosphere had made me a good German, and as a soldier I might at least earn my bread. To my joy, however, in one of my daily visits to the banking house the courteous young partner told me that a telegram had come in some roundabout way from Paris and they were prepared to pay me the full amount on my letter of credit. I clutched the money, two pretty cylinders of gold coin done up in white paper, which I sewed securely into the waist-band of my trousers and felt an instant strengthening of nerve and self-respect.
I departed then for Switzerland where I enjoyed a delightful fortnight. The rebound from my depression imparted a fine morale . Switzerland was practically deserted, no French or Germans were there for they had enough to do with the war; the English for the most part stayed at home, for Europe could only be crossed with difficulty, and the crowd from America too was deterred by the danger. Instead of the throngs at the great points of interest, the visitors counted by twos and threes. The guides and landlords were obsequious. We few strangers had the Alps to ourselves and they were as lavish of their splendours to the handful as to the multitude. At Geneva at last I found letters from home which caused me anxiety; I was referred for later news to letters which were to be sent to Paris; so there was nothing for it but for me to cross France, though by that time France had become a camp. Fortunately I had met in Switzerland an American friend who was proficient in French as I was not and who likewise found it necessary to go to Paris, and we two started together. After crossing the frontier we found no regular trains; those that ran were taken up for the most part by the multitudes of conscripts hurrying into armies that were undergoing disaster in the neighbourhood of Metz. The case of two American strangers was a precarious one involved in such a mass, with food even very uncertain and the likelihood of being side-tracked at any station, but we were both strong and light-hearted and I felt at my waist-band the comfortable contact of my bright yellow Napoleons which would pull us through. Constantly we beheld scenes of the greatest interest. The August landscape smiled its best about us, we passed Dijon and many another old storied city famous in former wars, and now again humming with the military life with which they had been so many times familiar. The Mobiles came thronging to every depot from the vineyards and fields and the remoter villages. As yet they were usually in picturesque peasant attire, young farmers in blouses or with bretelles crossing in odd fashion the queer shirts they wore. Careless happy-go-lucky boys chattering in the excitement of the new life which they were entering, only half-informed as to the catastrophes which were taking place, but the mothers and sisters, plain country women in short skirts, quaint bodices and caps, looked upon their departure with anxious faces. I was familiar enough with such scenes in our own Civil War; thousands of those boys were never to return.
Reaching Paris we found an atmosphere of depression. A week or two before the streets had resounded with the Marseillaise and echoed with the fierce cry, "A Berlin! A Berlin!" That confidence had all passed, I heard the Marseillaise sung only once, and that in disheartened perfunctory fashion, perhaps by order of the authorities in a futile attempt to stimulate courage that was waning. Rage and mortification over the fast-accumulating German successes possessed the hearts of men. In the squares companies of civilians were industriously drilling, often in the public places men wearing hospital badges extended salvers to the passers-by asking for contributions, "Pour les blessés, monsieur, pour les blessés!" Now and then well-disciplined divisions crossed the Place de la Concorde, the regiments stacking arms for a brief halt. I studied them close at hand; these at least looked as might have looked the soldiers of the First Empire, strong and resolute, with an evident capacity for taking care of themselves even in the small matter of cooking their soup, and providing for their needs there on the asphalt. Their officers were soldierly figures on horseback, dressed for rough work, and the gaitered legs, with the stout shoes below dusty already from long marching, were plainly capable of much more. There was a pathos about it all, however, a marked absence of élan and enthusiasm, the faces under the képis were firm and strong enough but they had little hope. Nothing so paralyses a soldier as want of confidence in the leadership and these poor fellows had lost that. The regiments passed on in turn, the sunlight glittering on their arms. Through the vista of the boulevard the eagles of the Second Empire rose above, the grave colonels were conspicuous at the head, and the drum-beats, choked by the towering buildings, sounded a melancholy muffled march that was befitting. It was the scene pictured by Détaille in Le Régiment quì Passe . Could he have been with us on the curbstone making his studies? It was indeed for them a funeral march, for they were on they way to Sedan. The Prussians, it was said, were within four days' march of the city, and the barrier at Metz had been completely broken down.
In most minds Paris is associated with gayety, my Paris, on the other hand, is a solemn spot darkened by an impending shadow of calamity. The theatres were closed. No one was admitted to the Invalides, so that I could not see the tomb of Napoleon. The Madeleine was open for service, but deep silence prevailed. In the great spaces of the temple the robed priests bowed before the altar and noiseless groups of worshippers knelt on the pavement. It was a time for earnest prayers. The Louvre was still open and I was fortunate enough to see the Venus of Milo, though a day or two after I believe it was taken from its pedestal and carefully concealed. The expectation was of something dreadful and still the city did not take in the sorrow which lay before it. "Do you think the Prussians will bombard Paris?" I heard a man exclaim, his voice and manner indicating that such a thing was incredible, but the Prussian cannon were close at hand. For our part, my companion and I thought we were in no especial danger. We quartered ourselves comfortably at a pension, walked freely about the streets, and saw what could be seen with the usual zest of healthy young travellers. The little steamboats were still plying on the Seine and we took one at last for the trip that opens to one so much that is beautiful and interesting in architecture and history. It was a lovely afternoon even for summer and we passed in and out under the superb arches of the bridges, beholding the noble apse of Notre Dame with the twin towers rising beyond, structures associated with grim events of the Revolution, the masonry of the quays and the master work of Haussmann who was then putting a new face upon the old city. Now all was bright and no thought of danger entered our minds as we revelled in the pleasures of such an excursion. At length as we stood on the deck we became aware that we were undergoing careful scrutiny from a considerable group who for the most part made up our fellow-passengers. We had had no thought of ourselves as especially marked. My clothes, however, had been made in Germany and had peculiarities no doubt which indicated as much. I was fairly well grounded in French but had no practice in speaking. In trying to talk French, my tongue in spite of me ran into German, which I had been speaking constantly for six months. This was particularly the case if I was at all embarrassed; my face and figure, moreover, were plainly Teutonic and not Latin. The French ascribed their disasters largely to the fact that German spies were everywhere prying into the conditions, and reporting every assailable point and element of weakness. This belief was well grounded; the Germans probably knew France better than the French themselves and skilfully adapted their attacks to the lacks and negligences which the swarming spies laid bare. The group, of whose scrutiny we had become aware, was made up of ouvriers and ouvrières , the men in the invariable blouse, with dark matted hair and black eyes, sometimes with a ratlike keenness of glance as they surveyed us. The women were roughly dressed, sometimes in sabots, with heads bare or surmounted by conical caps. They belonged to the proletariat, the class out of which had come in the Reign of Terror the sans-culottes of evil memory and the tricoteuses who had sat knitting about the guillotine , the class which, within a few months, was again to set the world aghast as the mob of La Commune . As we stood disconcerted by their intent gaze, they put their heads together and talked in low and rapid tones; then their spokesman approached us, a man of polite bearing but ominously stern. He was not a clumsy fellow, but darkly forceful and direct, a man capable of a quick, desperate deed. At the moment there was the grim tiger in their eyes and from the soft paw the swift protrusion of the cruel claw. One thought of the wild revolutionary song, "Ça ça, ça ira, les aristocrats à la lanterne!" They were the children of the mob that had sung that song. With a bow, the spokesman said: "Messieurs, we think you are Germans and we wish to know if we are right." We protested that we were Americans, but the spokesman said he was unconvinced, and as he pressed for further evidence I gave way to my companion whose readier French could deal better with the situation. He demanded to see our passports with which fortunately we were both provided; I had not thought of a passport as a necessity, and almost by chance had procured one the week before from our Minister in Switzerland, a careful description, vouching for my American citizenship, signed and sealed by the United States official. This perhaps saved my life. We surrendered our passports to our interrogator; he carried them back to the throng behind him who were now glowering angrily at us, as they chattered among themselves. Half-amused and half-alarmed, we waited while the documents were passed from hand to hand, carefully conned and inspected. We could not believe that we were in danger, here in the bright day in beautiful Paris, with the sacred towers of Notre Dame soaring close at hand. There were no gendarmes on the boat or on the quays, but how could it he that we needed protection? After a quarter of an hour's suspense, during which there had been a voluble counselling among the group, the spokesman came forth again with our passports in hand carefully folded, these he returned to us, touching his hat with a stiff and formal bow. "We have persuaded ourselves," said he, "that you are what you claim to be, Americans, and it is fortunate for you that it is so, for we had intended to throw you into the Seine as Prussian spies." Here was a surprise indeed! The group then dispersed about the boat apparently satisfied. Still rather amused than alarmed we pocketed our passports. Under the arch of one of the stately bridges close by, the Seine flowed in heavy shadows on its way, and we looked down upon the dark waters. Throbbing with life as we were, could it be possible that we had just escaped a grave in its watery embrace? Presently we landed light-hearted, and were again in the streets, but in days that followed immediately my heart was often in my throat, as I read in the papers of the corpses of men taken out of the river who undoubtedly had been thrown in under suspicion of being German spies. After a sojourn of not quite a week in Paris we made up our minds it was no place for us. My plans for study were quite broken up, it was scarcely possible to get back to Germany and nothing could be done in France. I had letters which in a time of peace would have opened the way for me to many a pleasant circle. My intention had been to study for some time in France, but under the circumstances it would be a comfortable thing to have the Atlantic rolling between me and Europe, and therefore, I prepared to depart for home. At the pension , on the day I had fixed for departure, while coming down the staircase waxed and highly polished, I slipped and fell heavily, so bruising my knee that I was nearly crippled. Fortunately no bones were broken and with much pain I managed to hobble to the official from whom I must obtain a pass to leave the city. I set out for the North, on almost the last train that left the city, at the end of August. The sights were gloomy, the towns which we passed seemed associated with ancient bloodshed. We touched St. Quentin and crossed the field of Malplaquet, and finally near Mons passed the Belgian frontier. Marlborough and the names associated with former wars were suggested to my thoughts by these historic spots. I was heartily glad when at length in cheerful Brussels I was beyond danger. On the fateful day when the Second Empire went down at Sedan, I was on the field of Waterloo where half a century before the First Empire had perished. The news of the morning made it plain that on that day the great débâcle was to culminate. We listened all day for cannon thunder; under certain conditions of the atmosphere the sound of heavy guns may reverberate as far perhaps, as from Sedan to Waterloo. That day, however, there was no ominous grumble from the eastward, the sky was cloudless, the flowers bloomed about the Château d'Hougomont, and the birds twittered in peace at the point before La Haie-Sainte to which the First Napoleon advanced in the evening and where for the last time he heard the shout then so long familiar but forever after unheard, "Vive l'Empereur!" Humiliation now after half a century had overwhelmed in turn his unhappy successor.
As a Harvard undergraduate I roomed for a time in Hollis 8, a room occupied in turn by William H. Prescott and James Schouler, and perhaps I may attribute to some contagion caught as a transmittendum in that apartment, an itch for writing history which has brought some trouble to me and to the rather limited circle of readers whom I have reached. I remember debating, as a boy, whether the more desirable fame fell to the hero in a conflict or to the scribe who told the story. Whose place would one rather have? That of Timoleon and Nicias or of Plutarch and Thucydides their celebrants? But the celebrants, no doubt, seemed to their contemporaries very insignificant figures compared to the champions whose fame they perpetuated. The historians of America are a goodly company, scarcely less worthy than the champions whose deeds they have chronicled. With most men who, during the last seventy-five years, have written history in America, I have had contact, sometimes a mere glimpse, sometimes intimacy. Washington Irving and Prescott I never saw, though as to the latter I have just been making him responsible to some extent for my own little proclivity, Parkman, I only saw sitting with his handsome Grecian face relieved against a dignified background as he sat on the stage among the Corporation of Harvard University. Motley I have only seen as he stood with iron-grey curls over a ruddy, strenuous countenance topping a figure of vigorous symmetry as he spoke with animation at a scholars' dinner. But George Bancroft, Justin Winsor, and John Fiske I knew well, the last being in particular one of my best friends. I could tell stories too, of the living lights, but am concerned here with the ghosts and not with men still red-blooded.
I first saw George Bancroft when he was Minister at Berlin. He had read a little book of mine, The Color Guard, my diary as a Corporal of the Nineteenth Army Corps, scribbled off on my cap-top, my gun-stock, or indeed my shoe-sole, or whatever desk I could extemporise as we marched and fought. That book gave me some claim to his notice, but a better claim was that his wife was Elizabeth Davis, whom more than a hundred years ago my grandfather of the ancient First Parish in Plymouth had baptised and who as a girl had been my mother's playmate in gardens near Plymouth Rock. I did not presume upon such credentials as these to obtrude myself, and was pleasantly surprised one day by a note inviting me to the Embassy. It was a retired house near the Thiergarten. I found Mr. Bancroft embarrassed with duties which in those days gave trouble. German emigrants returning after prosperous years to the Fatherland were often pounced upon, the validity of their American citizenship denied, and taxes and military service demanded. It was tough work to straighten out such knots and the Minister was in the midst of such a tangle. But his high, broad forehead smoothed presently, and his grey eyes grew genial, while the vivacious features spoke with the very cordial impulse with which he greeted one who had heard the bullets of the Civil War whistle and was the son of his wife's old friend. Another tie was that his father, Dr. Aaron Bancroft of Worcester, and my grandfather, had stood shoulder to shoulder in the controversy of a century ago which rent apart New England Congregationalism. Presently we sat down to lunch, a party of three, for the board was graced by the presence of Mrs. Bancroft, a woman of fine accomplishments polished through contact with high society in many lands, and a gifted talker. Many readers have found her published letters charming. The talk was largely of the Civil War and Bancroft's words were in the best sense patriotic. During and before that period his course had been much disapproved. He had been Collector of Boston under Democratic auspices and had served under Polk as Secretary of the Navy, where he laid the country lastingly under debt by establishing the Naval Academy at Annapolis. I do not approve or condemn, but I felt him wisely and warmly patriotic, deeply concerned that the outcome of our long national agony should be worthy of the sacrifice. The breath of a pleasant spring day pervaded the elegant apartment while the birds sang in the tall trees stretching out toward the forest of the Thiergarten. I especially associate with the Bancrofts their beautiful outdoor environment. Another day I drove with the Minister, our companions in the carriage being the wife and the daughter of Ernst Curtius, to visit the rose gardens about Berlin. I have met few men readier or more agreeable in conversation. With a pleasant smile and intonation he touched gracefully on this and that, sometimes in reminiscence. I remember in particular a vivid setting forth of an interview with Goethe which he had enjoyed as a boy fifty years before. Sometimes his talk was of poetry in general and I was much struck with his frequent happy application of quotations to the little events of the drive and phases of feeling that came up as the day went on. The sun set gloriously, " So stirbt ein Held ," said Bancroft, as he burst with feeling into the beautiful lyric of which these words are a line. The best German poetry seemed to be at his tongue's end and he recited it with sympathy and accuracy which called out much admiration from the cultivated German ladies with whom we were driving. Most interesting of all was Bancroft's evident passion for roses. The gardeners, as we stopped, were plainly surprised at his knowledge of their varieties and the best methods of cultivation. He was so well versed in the lore of the rose and so devoted to its cultivation one might well have thought it his horse and not his hobby. He possessed at Newport a rose garden far famed for the number of its varieties and the perfection of the flowers, and it was an interesting sight at Washington to see Bancroft, even when nearing ninety, busy in his garden in H Street, one attendant shielding his light figure with a sun umbrella, while another held at hand, hoe, shears, and twine, the implements to train and cull. Is there a subtle connection between roses and history? Parkman wrote an elaborate book upon rose culture which I believe is still of authority, and John Fiske had a conservatory opening out of his library and the rose of all flowers was the one he prized. Here is a neat turn of McMaster. At a dinner given in his honour a big bunch of American Beauties was opposite to him as he sat. It fell to me to make a welcoming speech. Catching at the occasion, I suggested a connection between roses and history and referred to McMaster close behind his American Beauties as an instance in point, at the same time expressing with earnestness my strong admiration of that good writer's work. McMaster rose, his face glowing in response to my emphatic compliment. His speech consisted of only one sentence, "I have one bond with the rose, I blush."
I owe many favours to Bancroft; the greatest perhaps that he allowed me to consult to my heart's content the papers of Samuel Adams, a priceless collection which he possessed. For this he gave me carte blanche to use his library in Washington, though he himself was absent, a favour which he said he had never accorded to an investigator before. It was an inspiring place for a student, the shelves burdened with treasures in manuscript as well as print. The most interesting portrait of Bancroft presents him as a nonagenarian, against this impressive background, at work to the last. The critics of our day minimise Bancroft and his school. History in that time walked in garments quite too flowing, it is said, and with an overdisplay of the Horatian purple patch. Our grandsons may feel that the history of our time walks in garments too sad-coloured and scant. Research and accuracy are, of course, primary requisites in this field, but there should be some employment of the picturesque. The world was beautiful in the old days and human life was vivid. Ought we to deny to all this a warm and graphic setting forth? If we do we shall do it to our cost. Is it the proper attitude of the historian simply to write, without thought of anything so irrelevant as a reader? Bancroft was a pioneer, breaking the way ponderously perhaps, but he delved faithfully. If the orotund rolls too sonorously in his periods it was an excess in which his age upheld him. He was a good path-breaker and ought not to be lightly esteemed by those who now go to and fro with ease through the roads he opened.
My first touch with Justin Winsor was in my Freshman year at Cambridge. We both had rooms under the roof of an uncle of mine. His room was afterwards occupied, I believe, by Theodore Roosevelt. It had been rubbed into me by many snubs that a vast gulf interposed between the Freshman and upper-class man. I used to pass his door with reverence, for the story went that, even as a boy, he had written a history of Duxbury, Massachusetts. Once during his temporary absence, his door standing open, I dared to step into the apartment and surveyed with awe the well-filled shelves and scribbled papers; but in later years when I had won some small title to notice I found him most kind and approachable. The abundance of the Harvard Library and still better the rich accumulations in the cells of his own memory he held for general use. He loaned me once for months at St. Louis a rarely precious seventeenth-century book, which had belonged to Carlyle, and whose margins were sometimes filled with Carlyle's notes. He imparted freely from his own vast information and it was pleasant indeed to hold a chair for an hour or two in his hospitable home. In our last interview the prose and the solemn romance of life were strangely blended. We had just heard the burial service in Appleton Chapel read by Phillips Brooks over the coffin of James Russell Lowell; then we rode together on the crowded platform of a street-car to the grave at Mount Auburn; a rough and jostling company on the platform, and in my mind a throng of deep and melancholy thoughts. I never saw him again. In his calling he was a master of research extracting with unlimited toil the last fragment of evidence from the blindest scribblings of earlier times. These results, painfully accumulated, he set down with absolute faithfulness; his bibliographies supplementing his own contributions and also those of the many writers whom he inspired and guided in like labours are exhaustive. Rarely is there a wisp to be gleaned where Winsor has garnered. If he was deficient in the power of vivid and picturesque presentment, it is only that like all men he had his limitations.
John Fiske I met soon after his graduation at Cambridge. It is odd to recall him when one thinks of his later physique, as a youth with fresh ruddy face, tall and not broad, a rather slender pillar of a man, corniced with an abundant pompadour of brown hair. He was just then making fame for himself in the domain of philosophy, contributing to the New York World papers well charged with revolutionary ideas which were then causing consternation, so lucidly and attractively formulated that they interested the most cursory reader. Perhaps John Fiske ought always to have kept to philosophy. Mrs. Mary Hemenway, that princess among Ladies Bountiful, told me once the story of his change. He made to her a frank statement of his situation. He was conscious of power to do service; he was married, had children, and was embarrassed with care about their bread, butter, and education after the usual fashion of the scholar. John Fiske said in those days the difficult problem of his life was to get enough corn-beef for dinner to have hash for breakfast the next day. Must he descend to desk and courtroom work to make a way, or could a way be found by which he might do his proper task and at the same time be a bread-winner? "Write American history," said Mrs. Hemenway, "and I will stand behind you." She was inspired with the idea of making America in the high sense American and saw in the young genius a good ally. The chance was embraced and John Fiske after that dipped only fitfully into philosophical themes, writing, however, The Destiny of Man, The Idea of God, Cosmic Roots of Loveland Self-sacrifice , and Life Everlasting . He gave his main strength, to a thing worth while, the establishment in America of Anglo-Saxon freedom. Would he have served the world better had he adhered to profound speculations? As the patriarch in a household into which have been born a dozen children and grandchildren, I have had good opportunity for study. What so feeble as the feebleness of the babe! It depends upon its mother for its sustenance, almost for its breath and its heart-beats. The sheltering arms and the loving breast must always be at hand as the very conditions of its existence. I have watched in wife and daughters, as what grandsire has not, the persistent sleepless care which alone kept the baby alive, and noted the sweet effusion of affection which the need and constant care made to flow abundantly, nor do the care and consequent outflow of love cease with babyhood. The child must ever be fed, clothed, trained, and counselled; and the youth, too, of which the baby is father, must be watchfully guided till the stature is completed. The rod of Moses smiting the rock evoked the beneficent water, the unremitting parent-care striking the indifferent heart evokes the beautiful mother and father love which grows abroad. We cannot love children well without loving others, their companions, and at last the great worldly environment in which they and we all are placed. Hence, from the extension of infancy, through a period of long years, proceeds at last from the hearts which are subjected to its influence the noble thing which we call altruism: love for others than ourselves and the other high spiritual instincts which are the crown of human nature. The recognition of the extension of infancy as the source from which in our slow evolution comes the brightest thing in the universe belongs to our own time. It is perhaps the climax of our philosophic speculation. What more feeble than the snowflakes! But accumulated and compressed they become the glacier which may carapace an entire zone and determine its configuration into mountain and valley. What more feeble than the feebleness of the babe! And yet that multiplied by the million through aeons of time and over continents of space fashions humanity after the sublime pattern shown on the Mount. If to John Fiske belongs the credit of first recognising in the scheme of evolution the significance of this mighty factor, the extension of infancy (he himself so believed and I do not think it can be questioned that he was the first to recognise it), what philosophic thinker has to a greater extent laid the world in debt? This I shall not further discuss. I am touching in these papers only upon light and exterior things, nor am I competent to deal with philosophical problems and controversies. John Fiske gave his strength to the writing of history, where, too, there are controversies into which I do not propose to enter. I will only say that I resent the account of him which makes him to have been a mere populariser whose merit lies solely or for the most part in the fact that, while appropriating materials accumulated by others, he had only Goldsmith's faculty of making them graceful and attractive to the mass of readers. His philosophical instinct, on the other hand, discovered, as few writers have done, the subtle links through which in history facts are related to facts and are weighed wisely, in the protagonists, the motives and qualities which make them foremost figures. He saw unerringly where emphasis should be put, what should be salient, what subordinate. Too many writers, German especially, perhaps, have the fault of "writing a subject to its dregs," giving to the unimportant undue place. In Fiske's estimation of facts there is no failure of proper proportion, the great thing is always in the foreground, the trifle in shadow or quite unnoticed. To do this accurately is a fine power. He delved more deeply himself perhaps than many of his critics have been willing to acknowledge, but I incline to say that his main service to history was in detecting with unusual insight the subtle relations of cause and effect, links which other and sometimes very able men failed adequately to recognise. In a high sense he was indeed a populariser. He wore upon himself like an ample garment a splendid erudition under which he moved, however, not at all oppressed or trammelled. Much of the lore of Greece, Rome, the Orient, and also of modern peoples was as familiar to him as the contents of the morning papers. With acumen he selected and his memory retained; the cells of his capacious brain somehow held it ready for instant use. With good discrimination he could touch lightly or discourse profoundly as occasion required, his learning and insight always telling effectively, either at the breakfast-table of the plain citizen, or in the pages of the school text-book. "John," said such a plain man the other day to a friend who also had been in touch with Fiske, "the biggest thing that ever came into your life or mine was when that broad thinker familiarly darkened our doors." The two men stood reverently under John Fiske's portrait, the autograph signature underneath seeming in a way to connect the living with the dead, acknowledging the force of the personality which had made real to them as nothing else had ever done the deepest and finest things.
John Fiske was often a guest in my home and I have sat, though less frequently, with him in his library in Berkeley Street in Cambridge, the flowers from the conservatory sending their perfumes among the crowded books and the south wind breathing pleasantly from the garden which had been Longfellow's, in the rear, to the garden of Howells in front. His passion for music was scarcely less than his interest in speculation and history. He knew well the great composers, and had himself composed. Though the master of no instrument, he could touch the piano with feeling. He had a pleasant baritone voice, and nothing gave him more refreshment after a week of study or lecturing than to pour himself out in song. His accompanist had need not only of great technical skill but of stout vertebrae, and strong wrists; for hours at a time the piano stool must be occupied while the difficult melodies of various lands were unriddled and interpreted. Those were interesting afternoons when, dropping his pen, he plunged into music as a strong confident swimmer plunges into the stream which he especially loves, interpreting with warm feeling Mendelssohn and Beethoven, wandering unlost in the vocal labyrinths of Dvorak and Wagner, but never happier than when interpreting the emotions of simple folk-songs, or some noble Shakespearian lyrics like "Who is Sylvia, what is she, that all the swains commend her?" Music stimulated him to vivacity and in the pauses would come outbursts of abandon. One day the pet dog of a daughter of mine ensconced himself unawares under the sofa and was disrespectfully napping while John Fiske sang. In a pause the philosopher broke into an animated declamation over some matter while standing near the sofa, whereat the pug thinking himself challenged tore out to the front with sudden violent barks. The two confronted each other, the pug frantically vindicating his dignity while the philosopher on his side fixing his eye upon the interrupter declaimed and gesticulated. As to volubility and sonorousness they stood about equal. I am bound to say the pug prevailed. John Fiske retired in discomfiture while the pug was carried off in triumph in the arms of his little mistress. He had fairly barked the great man down. I once shared with him the misery of being a butt. In St. Louis in those days the symposium was held in honour, and particularly N.O. Nelson, the well-known profit-sharing captain of industry, was the entertainer of select groups whose geniality was stimulated by modest potations of Anheuser-Bush, in St. Louis always the Castor and Pollux in every convivial firmament. Such a symposium was once held in special honour of Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson, a transient visitor. "Dr. Emerson," said a guest, "in the diary of your father just edited by you occurs a passage which needs illumination. 'Edward and I tried this morning for three quarters of an hour to get the calf into the barn without success. The Irish girl stuck her finger into his mouth and got the calf in in two minutes. I like folks that can do things.' Now," said the guest, "we all know what became of Emerson, we all know what became of Edward, for you are here to-night, but what became of the Irish girl and the calf?" Dr. Emerson laughingly explained the probable fate of the girl and the calf, and in the hilarity that followed, the question arose as to why the Irish girl's finger had been so persuasive. I, city-bred and green as grass as to country lore, rashly attempted to explain; the inserted finger gave a good purchase on the calf which in its pain became at once tractable, but the men present who had been farm-boys, with loud laughter ridiculed the suggestion. Did I not know that nature had provided a conduit through which the needed sustenance was conveyed from the maternal udder, and that it was quite possible to delude the unsuspecting calf into the belief that the slyly inserted finger was that conduit? The triumph of the Irish girl was explained, and I sank back, covered with confusion. Fiske, however, blurted out: "Why, I never should have thought of that in all my life," whereat he too became the target of ridicule.
I never saw John Fiske happier than once at Concord. Our host had invited us for a day and had prepared a programme that only Concord could furnish. The prelude was a performance of the Andante to a Sonata of Rubinstein, Opus 12, rendered exquisitely by the daughter of our host. I saw the great frame of my fellow-guest heave with emotion while his breath came almost in sobs as his spirit responded to the music. Then came a canoe-trip on the river to which John Fiske joyfully assented though some of the rest of us were not without apprehension. Fiske in a canoe was a ticklish proposition, but there he was at last, comfortably recumbent, his head propped up on cushions, serenely at ease though a very narrow margin intervened between water-line and gunwale. The performer of the Sonata, who was as deft at the paddle as she was at the piano, served as his pilot and propeller while the rest of us formed an escort which could be turned into a rescue party if occasion required. A stout, capacious rowboat followed immediately in the wake of the canoe. We went down the dark, placid current in the fine summer weather to the Battleground, and then looked into the solemn forest aisle which arches over the narrow Assabeth. The day was perfect, the flowers and birds were at their best, the pleasant nature was all about us. All this John Fiske drank in to the full but still more was he touched by the great associations of the environment. From the bank yonder had been "fired the shot heard round the world." The hill-tops, meadows, the gentle river had been loved and frequented by Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson; in these surroundings had bloomed forth the finest flowering of American literature. No heart could be more sensitive than was his to influences of this kind. As we moved cautiously about him, anxious about the equilibrium, though he was calm, he discoursed with animation. The afternoon waned gloriously into the dusk of the happy day.
The little hill-town of Petersham in the back of Worcester County was John Fiske's summer home, a spot he tenderly loved. It is a retired place made very attractive in later years through the agency of his brother-in-law, who with wise and kindly art has added to the natural beauty. I saw John Fiske here in his home of homes to which his heart clung more and more fondly as his end approached. The weight of his great body, accumulating morbidly in a way which could not be counteracted, fairly overwhelmed at last his bright and noble life. As the doctors put it, a heart made for a frame of one hundred and sixty pounds could not do the work for three hundred. When, in his weakness, death was suggested to him as probably near, "Death!" said he simply and sweetly, "why, that only means going to Petersham to stay!" and there among the flowers and fields, remote from the world, though his spirit remains widely and solemnly pervasive, he has gone to stay.
When I went to England in 1886 to collect materials for a life of Young Sir Henry Vane, John Fiske gave me a letter to Dr. Richard Garnett, then Superintendent of the Reading Room in the British Museum. He afterwards became Sir Richard Garnett and was promoted to be Keeper of Printed Books, perhaps the highest position among the librarians of the world, a post to which he did honour. Dr. Garnett, slender and alert, the heaped-up litter of volumes and manuscripts in his study telling at a glance where his tastes lay, was nevertheless as he needed to be most practical and business-like. Though an accomplished littérateur touching with versatility poetry, criticism, history, philosophy, and still other fields, this was his hobby only, his main work being when I knew him to make available for readers crowding from all lands seeking information of all kinds, the treasures of this wonderful store-house. He treated me with the kindest courtesy, but I have no reason to feel that I was an exception. He stood on that threshold, a welcomer of all scholars, for his good nature was no more marked than the comprehensiveness of his information and the dexterity with which without the least delay, he put into the hands of each searcher the needed books. Perhaps it was an unusual favour that, influenced no doubt, by my good introduction, he took a half-hour out of his busy morning to conduct me himself through the Egyptian collection. We passed rapidly among statues and hieroglyphics, his abundant knowledge appearing transiently as he touched upon object after object while at the same time in an incisive and witty vein he spoke of America and the events of the day. Pausing at last before the great scarabaeus of polished syenite whose huge size required a place in the centre of the corridor, he said with a twinkle, "I must tell you a story about this of which one of your countrymen is the hero. I was walking with him here in the collection and expected from him some expression of awe, but like so many of you Americans, he wouldn't admit that he saw anything that couldn't be paralleled in the United States until we stood before the scarabaeus. Here his mood changed; his face fell, he slowly walked around the scarabaeus three times and then exclaimed, 'It's the all-firedest, biggest bug I ever saw in all my born days'"! I palliated patriotically the over-breezy nonchalance of my countryman and thought I had got at the bottom of the joke, but that evening at a little tea I was undeceived. A small company were present of men and women, talk flowed easily and when it came my turn I told the story of the Yankee and the scarabaeus which I had heard that day. As I brought out with emphasis the "all-firedest, biggest bug ," I noticed that a frost fell on the mirth, silence reigned for a moment interrupted only by gasps from the ladies. What impropriety had I committed? Presently a little man behind the coffee-urn at the far end of the table, whom I had heard was a bit of a scientist, piped up: "Perhaps the Professor doesn't know that in England, when we talk about bugs, we mean that cimex which makes intolerable even the most comfortable bed." At last I had Dr. Garnett's story in its full force.
When I explained to Dr. Garnett my errand, an elaborate investigation of an historic figure, said he: "You must know Samuel Rawson Gardiner, the best living authority for the period of the English Civil War. Now Dr. Gardiner is peculiar. His great history of that period as yet takes in nothing later than 1642. Up to that date he will have all the information and help you generously. Of the time beyond that date he will have nothing to say, be mute as a dumb man. He has not finished his investigations and has a morbid caution about making any suggestion based on incomplete data." A day or two afterward I was in the Public Record Office in Fetter Lane, the roomy fire-proof structure which holds the archives of England. You sit in the Search Room, a most interesting place. Rolls and dusty tomes lie heaped about you, the attendants go back and forth with long strips of parchment knotted together by thongs, hanging down to the floor before and behind, written-over by the fingers of scribes in the mediaeval days and sometimes in the Dark Ages. The past becomes very real to you as you scan Domes Day Book which once was constantly under the eye of William the Conqueror, or the documents of kings who reigned before the Plantagenets. As I sat busy with some original letters of Henry Vane, written by him when a boy in Germany in the heart of the Thirty Years' War, a vigorous brown-haired man came up to me with a pleasant smile and introduced himself as Samuel Rawson Gardiner. Dr. Garnett had told him about me and about my especial quest, and with rare kindness, he offered to give me hints. It was for me a fortunate encounter, for no other man knew, as Gardiner did, the ground I desired to cover. He put into my hands old books, unprinted diaries, scraps of paper inscribed by great figures in historic moments, the solid sources, and also the waifs and strays from which proper history must be built up. He would look in upon me time after time in the Search Room; in the Reading Room of the British Museum we sat side by side under the great dome. We were working in the same field and the experienced master passed over to the neophyte the yellow papers and mildewed volumes in, which he was digging, with suggestions as to how I might get out of the chaff the wheat that I wanted. He invited me to his home at Bromley in Kent, where he allowed me to read the proofs of the volume in his own great series which was just then in press. It related to matters that were vital to my purpose and I had the rare pleasure of reading a masterly work and seeing how the workman built, inserting into his draft countless marginal emendations, the application of sober second thought to the original conception. I spent the best part of the night in review and it was for me a training well worth the sacrifice of sleep. In the pleasant July afternoon we sat down to tea in the little shaded garden where I met the son and daughter of my host and also Mrs. Gardiner, an accomplished writer and his associate in his labours. The interval between tea and dinner we filled up with a long walk over the fields of Kent during which appeared the social side of the man. He told me with modesty that he was descended from Cromwell through Ireton, and the vigour of his stride, with which I found it sometimes hard to keep up, made it plain that he was of stalwart stock and might have marched with the Ironsides. A day or two later he bade me good-bye; he and his wife departing for the continent for a long bicycle tour. The indefatigable scholar was no less capable in the fields and on the high road than in alcoves and the Search Room.
Lecky was not in England at the time of my visit and I can only claim to have had with him an epistolary acquaintance. To some extent I have worked on the same themes with him, and preserve among my treasures certain letters in which he made me feel that he regarded my accomplishment as not unworthy. Sir Charles Dilke and the Bishop of Oxford, William Stubbs, author of the great Constitutional History , I also never met, but I have letters from them which I keep with those of Lecky as things which my children will prize. With Edward A. Freeman, however, I came into cordial relations, a character well worthy of a sketch. He once came to America where with his fine English distinction behind him he met a good reception. He deported himself after the fashion of many another great Englishman, somewhat clumsily. At St. Louis he amusingly misapprehended conditions. Remembering the origin of the city he took it for granted that the audience which greeted him was for the most part of French descent, whereas probably not a dozen persons present had a trace of French blood in their veins. Because backwoodsmen a few generations before had possessed that region he took it for granted that we were backwoodsmen still. He addressed us under these misconceptions, the result being a "talking down" to a company of supposedly Latin extraction and quite illiterate. The fact was that the crowd, Anglo-Saxon with a strong infusion of German, was made up of people of high intelligence, the best whom the city could furnish, a city at the time noted for its interest in philosophical pursuits and the home of a highly educated class. Freeman's well-meant remarks would have seemed elementary to an audience of school-children. The address was quite inadequate and the unfortunate visitor had a rather cool reception. Freeman was only one of many in all this. The astronomer R.A. Proctor came to similar grief for a similar gaucherie , and even so famous a man as Lord Kelvin suffered in like manner. I have been told that at Yale University when addressing a college audience zealous for their own institution, he stumbled badly on the threshold by enlarging on the great privilege he was enjoying in speaking to the students of Cornell, proceeding blandly under the conviction that he was at Ithaca instead of under the elms of New Haven. But this clumsiness in Freeman and in others was only a surface blemish. He was a great writer treating with profound learning the story of Greece and Rome and South-western Europe in general, and illuminating as probably no other man has done the distant Saxon and early Norman dimnesses that lie in the background of our own past. I held him in thorough respect and when, following an article I had prepared in London for the Pall Mall Gazette , I received a polite note from him inviting me to come to see him at Somerleaze near Wells, I was much rejoiced. I went thither, passing through the beautiful green heart of England. In Wiltshire from the car-window I caught sight of a distant down on which, the substratum of chalk showing through the turf skilfully cut away, appeared the figure of a gigantic white horse, the memorial of an old Saxon battle; thence passing near Glastonbury and skirting the haunts of ancient Druids in the Mendip Hills, I was attuned for a meeting with a scholar who more than any other man of the time had aroused interest in the old life of England. I alighted at Wells where a trap was waiting, and drove between hedgerows for two miles to the secluded mansion. It lay back from the road, a roomy manor house thickly surrounded by groves and gardens. I was put at ease at once by the friendly welcome of Mrs. Freeman, a charming hostess who met me at the door. Freeman soon entered, a veteran of sixty, his florid English face set off by a long beard, and hair rather dishevelled, tawny, and streaked with gray. Like Gardiner he was of vigorous mould and we presently strode off together through the lanes of the estate with the sweet landscape all about us. His talk was animated and related for the most part to the objects which we passed and the points that came into view on the more distant hills. It was rather the talk of a local antiquary than of a historian in a comprehensive sense, though now and then a quickly uttered phrase linked a trifling detail with the great world movement; the spirit was most kindly. Returning to the house he stooped to the ground and picked up a handsome peacock's feather which he gave with a bow as a souvenir of the walk. At dinner we met Miss Freeman, an accomplished daughter. There was only one guest besides myself, a man whom I felt it was good fortune to meet. It was the Rev. William Hunt, since that time well known as a large contributor to Leslie Stephen's great Dictionary of National Biography, President of the English Historical Society, and author of many valuable works. It so happened that a few weeks before, my Life of Samuel Adams had come under his notice and gained his approval, which he had expressed in a cordial fashion in the Saturday Review by an article which had caused me much satisfaction. An evening followed full of interesting things. Miss Freeman played the piano for us with much skill, and then came a most animated talk which, though genial, was critically pungent. The United States was often sharply attacked and I was put to all my resources to parry the prods that were directed at our weak places. I did not escape some personal banter. Feeling that I was in a congenial atmosphere I announced with warmth my persistent love for England, though my stock had been fixed in America since 1635. I spoke of a cherished tradition of my family. The chronicler, Florence of Worcester, describes an ancient battle in the year of 1016 between Edmond Ironside and the Danes. The battle was close and the Danes at one point had taken captive a Saxon champion who looked very much like the king. By cutting off his head and holding it up before the Saxon army they well-nigh produced a panic, for the Saxons believed that their king was slain, and Edmond had a lively quarter of an hour in correcting the error and restoring order. He finally did so and won victory at last. The chronicler gave the name of the Saxon who thus suffered untimely decapitation as Hosmer. I told the story and Freeman at once insisted that it should be confirmed. He sent his daughter to the library, who returned bearing a huge tome containing the chronicle of Florence of Worcester. Freeman turned at once to the date, 1016, and there was the passage in the quaint mediaeval Latin. It was indeed a Hosmer who unwittingly had so nearly brought Edmond Ironside to grief. "Was I descended from the man?" queried Freeman. Quite proud that my story had been substantiated and perhaps a bit vainglorious over the fact that a man of my name had looked like a king, I was not slow in saying that I probably was, that my line for six hundred years after that date, honest yeomen, had lived near the spot, in the fields of Kent. Freeman assented to the probability, but it was suggested by others present that there was a further tradition. The Hosmer of 1016 had lost his head, the Hosmers since that day had been constantly losing theirs, in fact, there had been no man of that name since that time in England who had any head worth speaking of, indeed they were said to be born without heads. Had this curious heredity been transmitted to the American line? I was forced to admit with confusion that I could cite no circumstances to rebut the suspicion, but all was good-natured though pungent, and when we broke up I retired to the guest chamber in a pleasant excitement. Freeman, who conducted me himself, brought the guest-book, calling my attention to the fact that the chamber had shortly before been occupied by Gladstone. The next morning we drove to Wells where, under the guidance of Freeman and Mr. Hunt, I studied for some hours the beautiful cathedral. It is not so large as many cathedrals, but few of them are more interesting. The front is finely impressive; a curious, inverted arch in the choir which descends from the ceiling to meet an arch rising from the floor at a point midway between the roof and pavement is a unique thing in architecture, a master-stroke of the mediaeval builder who solved a problem of construction and at the same time produced a thing of beauty. I remember, too, in a chapel, an example of a central column rising like a slender stem of a lily and foliating at the top into a graceful tracery, springing from the columns which surround and enclose the space. All this is elaborated with exquisite detail in the white stone. My guides, who were full of feeling for the architectural perfection, knew well the story of the builders and the interesting events with which through the centuries a masterpiece had been associated. It was a charming visit closed, appropriately, by this inspection under Freeman's guidance, of the cathedral of Wells.
Goldwin Smith was a cosmopolite; a citizen as much of Canada and the United States as of England; a man indeed who would have preferred to call himself a citizen of the world. But in England he was born and bred and began his career; under the Union Jack he died, and he may rightly be classed as an English historian. My acquaintance with Goldwin Smith began a quarter of a century back, in the interchange of notes and books. I was interested in the same fields which he had illustrated. I looked upon him as more than any other writer, perhaps, my master. I was in love with his spirit from the first and thought that no other man had considered so well topics connected with the unity of English-speaking men in a broad bond of brotherhood. I did not set eyes on him until 1903, being for that year President of the American Library Association which was to meet at Niagara Falls. I invited Goldwin Smith to give the principal address. The librarians of Canada, as well as the United States, were to assemble on the frontier between the two countries, and it seemed desirable that a man standing under two flags should be spokesman and this character fitted Goldwin Smith precisely. But that year he became eighty years old. In the spring he was ill and did not dare to undertake in June an elaborate address. When we assembled at Niagara Falls, however, I found him there. He had come from Toronto to show his good-will and he spoke several times in our meetings; deliverances which, while neither long nor formal, were well worth hearing. He was a stately presence, tall, slender, and erect even at eighty, with a commanding face and head which had every trait of dignity. I had several opportunities for private talk and it appeared that his natural force was by no means abated. It would no doubt be more just to class him as a critic in politics, literature, and philosophy rather than an historian, but in the latter capacity, too, his service was great. His talk was fluent, incisive, and put forward without reference to what might be the prejudices or indeed the well-based principles of his listeners. He lashed bitterly the Congress of the United States for refusing through fear of Irish disapproval to do honour to John Bright. His tongue was a sword and cut sharply, and while he won respect always, often excited opposition and sometimes hatred. Napoleon in particular was a bête noire , to whom he denied even the possession of military genius. His courage was serene and he was quite indifferent as to whether he were hissed or applauded. He moved in a lofty atmosphere and the praise and blame of men counted for little with him, as on his high plane he discussed and judged. But it was impossible to entertain for Goldwin Smith any other feeling than profound respect, his accomplishments were vast, his memory unfailing, his ideals the highest, his sense of justice the keenest. His was a nature perhaps to evoke veneration rather than affection, and yet to men worthy of it he could be heartily cordial and friendly. The inscription on the stone erected to his memory at Cornell University is "Above all nations is humanity." In his thought any limitation of the sympathies within the comparatively narrow bounds of one country was a vice rather than a virtue, and no nation was worthy to endure which did not stand for the good of the world at large; into love for all humanity narrower affections should emerge. He invited me to spend some days at the Grange at Toronto in his beautiful home, but circumstances made it impossible. I am glad to have seen Goldwin Smith at Niagara; that majestic environment befitted the subduing stateliness of his presence, his intellect, power, and elevation of view. He was one of the most exalted men I have ever known.
Of my friend Bishop Phillips Brooks, I hope to say something by-and-by. I only mention now that when I asked him in 1886 for a letter or two to friends in England, whither I was going to collect material for a life of the colonial governor, he heartily said, "I will give you a letter to the best Englishman I know, and that is James Bryce."
Arriving one July day in London, I posted my letter and received at once an invitation from Mr. Bryce to call upon him in Downing Street, where, as Under Secretary of State, he then made his official home.
Mark Twain's tears over the grave of Adam, a relative buried in a strange land, all will recall. On a basis as good perhaps, I walked through Downing Street with a certain sense of proprietorship, for did it not bear the name and had it not been the home of my brother in the pleasant Harvard bond, Sir George Downing, of the class of 1642? In the ante-room with its upholstery of dark-green leather I mused for a few minutes alone, over diplomatic conferences of which it had probably been the scene, but Mr. Bryce quickly entered, slight and sinewy, in his best years, kindly, courteous to the man sent by a friend whom he held among the closest. Bryce at that time was on the threshold of his fame. He had written The Holy Roman Empire which I knew well. He had been Regius Professor at Oxford, whose shades he had not long before forsaken for politics. That he had a special interest in and knowledge of America, the world did not know. He apologised for turning me off briefly then, but "Come to dinner," said he, "at my house to-night in Bryanstone Square." I was prompt to keep the appointment. A drizzle filtered through the night as the cab arrived at the door, but there was a cheery light in the windows and a warm welcome to the entering guest. There were three or four besides myself; a young officer just home from the campaign in the Soudan, Dr. Richter the authority in music and art, and the brother and sister of the host. I felt it a high distinction that I handed out to dinner the stately lady, the mother of my host. The conversation was general. Bits of African experience from the young soldier, glimpses into Richter's special fields, and a contribution or two from the Mississippi Valley, from me. In the talk that followed the dinner Mr. Bryce showed himself at home in German as much as in English, but what surprised me most was his puzzling curiosity about minutiae of our own politics. Why did the Mayor of Oshkosh on such and such dates veto the propositions of the aldermen as to the gas supply? And why did the supervisors of Pike County, Missouri, pass such and such ordinances as regards the keeping of dogs? These, or similar questions were fired at me rapidly, uttered with a keen attention as to my reply. I was quite confused and lame on what was supposedly my own ground. How queer, I thought, was the interest and the knowledge of this stranger. But in a few months I felt better. The American Commonwealth appeared, revealing Bryce as a man who had set foot in almost our every State and Territory, and who had an intimacy with America such as no American even possessed.
I am speaking here of historians, but may appropriately give a little space to an account of that wonderful acre or two of ground at Westminster, where for so many centuries the history of the English-speaking race has been to such an extent focused.
In looking up Young Sir Henry Vane, it seemed fitting to have some knowledge of Parliament, and I welcomed the chance when, on the 19th of August, 1886, Parliament convened. It was a time of agitation. At the election just previous the Liberals, with Gladstone at the head of the Cabinet, had undergone defeat and the Conservatives had come in with Lord Randolph Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The first night was sure to be full of turmoil and excitement. Through Mr. Bryce's good offices I had a seat in the Strangers' Gallery. The student of history must always tread the precincts of Westminster with awe. There attached to the Abbey is the Chapter House. The central column divides overhead into the groins that form the arched ceiling, the stones at its base still bearing a stain from the rubbing elbows of mediaeval legislators, the floor worn by their hurrying feet, for from the time of Edward I. the Chapter House remained for centuries the legislative meeting-place. The old St. Stephen's Chapel to which Parliament at length removed was burned some eighty years since, but Westminster Hall, its attachment—the great hall of William Rufus, escaped and the new buildings of Parliament stand on the site of its former home. The present House of Commons occupies the ground of the old Chapel and in size and arrangement differs little from it. The Hall is small. The seven hundred members seated on the benches which slope up from the centre, crowd the floor space, while the galleries for the press at one end, for strangers at the other, and for the use of the Lords and the Diplomatic corps at the sides give only meagre accommodation. I passed into the building at nightfall, getting soul-stirring glimpses into the great area of Westminster Hall, in which burned only one far-away light. Its grandeur was more impressive in the dimness than in the glare. The lofty associations of the spot, coronations of kings, the reverberations of eloquence, the illustrious victims that had gone out from its tribunal to the scaffold thronged in my thought as I momentarily paused. But time pressed and I passed on to the central Hall where I stood in a jostling crowd, absorbed in the present with little thought of the fine frescoes that lined the walls or of the history that had been made in that environment. I was to send in my card to Mr. Bryce and while I stood puzzled as to what course to take, a good friend came to my side in the person of Sir Henry Norman. He had not then received his knightly title but was simply assistant to W.T. Stead on the Pall Mall Gazette , pushing his way, but already marked for a distinguished and eccentric career. He came to America as a youth and entered the Harvard Theological School. Inverting his pyramid, after beginning with the cone, he put in the base, taking up the work of undergraduate, and studying for an A.B. At Harvard he is best remembered as Creon in the Oedipus Tyrannus , where his handsome face and figure and mellifluous Greek won much admiration. Soon after, he cast to the winds both his Greek and theology and was in London fighting his way in the Press. Since then he has become famous for Oriental travel and observation, in which field he is an authority, and also as a member of Parliament. A friendship with him had been conciliated for me by a good letter from Edwin D. Mead, and I was glad to have him by my side that night. Through his help I soon was in the hands of Mr. Bryce and under his guidance found the way to my appointed seat. The House was in an uproar as I entered and from my point of vantage I looked down upon the scene, undignified, but full of most virile life. At the opposite end of the Hall sat Speaker Peel, in gown and wig, his sonorous cries of "Order! order!" availing little it seemed, to quiet the assembly. In the centre of the Chamber stood the famous table, the mace reposing at the end, the symbol that the House was in formal session. On one side sat the members of the new Cabinet, the foremost and most interesting figure, Lord Randolph Churchill. Opposite to them across the width of the table were the leaders of the opposition, Gladstone at the fore. The benches were densely crowded with members. Under my feet where I could not see them were the Irish members, not visible but noisily audible. Many men of note were in their seats that night. A powerful voice was ringing through the Chamber as I took my seat, which I soon found was that of Bradlaugh. His utterance was a sustained declamation. But there were ejaculations, sometimes mere hoots and cat-calls, sometimes crisply-shouted sentences rose into the air. "I belong to a society for the abolition of the House of Lords," came thundering up. It was from Sir Wilfred Lawson, the radical from Carlisle, whose statue now stands on the Thames Embankment. Lord Randolph Churchill made that night what I suppose was the great speech of his life, for some two hours facing the Irish members waging a forensic battle, memorable for even the House of Commons. From my perch I looked directly into his face at a distance of not many feet as he confronted the Irish crowd. Rather short of stature, he was a compact figure, and his face had in it combative energy as the marked characteristic. He outlined the policy of the new government with serene indifference to the stormy disapproval which almost every sentence evoked. When the outcry became deafening, he paused with a grim smile on his bull-dog face until the interruption wore itself out. "This disturbance makes no difference to me," he would quietly say, "I am only sorry to have the time of the House wasted in such unreasonable fashion." Then would come another prod and a new chorus of howls rolling thunderously from the cavern under my feet. It is not in line with my present plan to describe this speech; that may be found in Hansard under the date. I touch only on the outside manner as he fought his fight. It was a fine example of cool, imperturbable, unshrinking assault, and I thought that in some such way his ancestor, the great Duke of Marlboro, might have ruled the hour at Blenheim and Malplaquet. Many years after it fell to me to introduce to an audience his son Winston Churchill who, when his father was Chancellor of the Exchequer, was a schoolboy at Harrow. I took occasion to describe briefly the battle I had seen his father wage at Westminster. It pleased Winston Churchill then fresh from the fields of South Africa. "That was indeed a great speech of my father's," he said. Since then the son has developed into a combatant probably not less formidable than his forebears.
This was well worth while for me, desiring to see the Parliament of England in its most interesting moods, but something came later which I treasure more. While the conflict proceeded, in his place near the mace but a yard or two distant from the conspicuous figure sat Gladstone. I had seen him enter the House, a massive frame dressed in a dark frock-coat which hung handsomely upon his broad shoulders, with the strong head and face above, set in a lion-like mane of disordered hair. He sat unmoved and quiet throughout the conflict as he might have done at a ladies' tea-party, but now he rose to speak. At once complete silence pervaded the Chamber. I believe I have never seen so impressive an exhibition of the power of a great personality. Foes as well as friends waited almost breathless for the words that were to come. It was a time of crisis. He had just met defeat. What could the discredited leader say?
He began in a voice scarcely above a whisper, though in the silence it was distinctly audible, but the tones strengthened and deepened as he proceeded. His audience hung upon his every word, and so he discoursed for half an hour. It was not a great speech,—a series of calm, unimpassioned statements in which clearness of phrase and absolute abstention from aggressive attack upon his opponents were the most marked characteristics. It was courteous toward friend and foe, and foes no less than friends received each clear-cut sentence with attention most respectful. I was a bit disappointed not to see the old lion aroused and in his grandeur. But it is a thing to prize that I witnessed a manifestation made in his full strength and in the acme of his dominance. It was worth while to see that even in no great mood, the force of his leadership was recognised and reserve power of the man fully felt. Like every Achilles, Gladstone was held by the heel when dipped. One may well feel that he came short as a theologian. The scholars slight his Homeric disquisitions. Consistency was a virtue which he probably too often scouted, but his high purpose, his spotlessness of spirit, and strong control of men no one can gainsay. In the slang of the street of that time he was the "G.O.M.," the Grand Old Man as well to those who fought him as to those who loved him. An impressive incident of the session occurred in the address of the "Mover of the Queen's Speech." The orator in brilliant court attire, a suit of plum-coloured velvet with full wig and small-clothes which seemed almost the only bit of colour in the soberly, sometimes rather shabbily, dressed assemblage, a costume which through long tradition attaches to the function which he discharged, prefaced his remarks with this tribute: "However we may differ from the honourable member for Midlothian, we are all willing to admit that he is the most illustrious of living Englishmen." In spite of the general bitterness of the tumultuous controversy, one felt that there lay beneath it all a certain fine magnanimity. Both Liberal and Tory believed in the substantial patriotism and good purpose of the adversary as a fundamental concession and that all were seeking the best welfare of England. The differences regarded only the expedients which were proper for the moment. One could see that foes furious in the arena might at the same time be closest personal friends. It was not a riddle that in the tea-rooms and the smoking-rooms Greek and Trojan could sit together in friendly tête-à-tête , or that such incidents could occur as the genial congratulations extended by Gladstone to Joseph Chamberlain over the fine promise of his son Austin Chamberlain making his début in Parliament; congratulations extended when the two statesmen were at swords' points,—a friendly talk as it were, through helmet bars when the slash was at the sharpest.
As I went home that night, through the streets of London, my mind and heart were full. My special studies at the moment were familiarising me with what lay behind the scene which I had just beheld. In similar fashion in the days of Edward I. and Simon De Montfort, the Commons of England, then struggling up, had wrestled in the narrow Chapter House. And so they had fought in the Lancastrian time; and after the Tudor incubus had been lifted off. So under the Stuarts had the wrangling proceeded from which came at length the "Petition of Right." Substituting the doublet and the steeple hat for their modern equivalents, the spectacle of the Long Parliament must have been very similar. Speaker Lenthall no doubt shouted "Order! Order!" as did his successor Speaker Peel, while Pym, Hampden, Cromwell, and Vane passionately inveighed against Prelacy and the "Man of Blood," as I had just heard the Radicals of the Victorian era overwhelm with diatribe the obstructors of the popular will. Then, during the subsoiling which the land, growing arid and worthless through mediaeval blight, underwent in 1832 and after, when the Reform Bill and its successors, like deeply penetrating plows, threw to the surface much that was unsightly, yet full of potentialities for good, the spot was the same. The conditions and the environment looking at it in the large were not widely different, the ancient Anglo-Saxon freedom struggling ever for its foothold as the centuries lapse, now precariously uncertain as Privilege and Prerogative push hotly, now fixed and strong in great moments of triumph; and the end is not yet. In the earlier time the destinies of America were closely interlocked with England and came up no less for decision in the great arena at Westminster. The destinies of the two peoples are scarcely less interlocked at the present moment. We are gravitating toward closer brotherhood, and the thoughtful American sees reason to study with the deepest interest each passage of arms in the ancient memorable arena.
* * * * *
I saw in Germany in 1870, usually through the good offices of Bancroft, our minister, the most eminent historians of that day. Giesebrecht and von Raumur were no longer living, but men were still in the foreground to the full as illustrious. Heidelberg in those days was relatively a more conspicuous university than at present. Its great men remain to it, though the process of absorption was beginning which at last carried the more distinguished lights to Berlin. The lovely little town, whose streets for nearly six hundred years have throbbed with the often boisterous life of the student population, is at its best in the spring and early summer. The Neckar ripples tumultuously into the broad Rhine plain, from which towers to the height of two thousand feet the romantic Odenwald. From some ruin of ancient watch-tower or cloister on the height, entrancing views spread out, the landscape holding the venerable towns of Worms and Speyer, each with its cathedral dominating the clustered dwellings, while the lordly Rhine pours its flood northward—a stream of gold when in the late afternoon it glows in the sunset. The old castle stands on its height, more beautiful in its decay, with ivy clinging about the broken arches, and the towers wrecked by the powder-bursts of ancient wars, than it could ever have been when unshaken.
Among the professors at Heidelberg, von Treitschke was one of the most eminent, and it was my privilege one day to hear him lecture on a theme which stirred him—the battle of Leipsic, the great Völkerschlacht of 1813, when Germany cruelly clipped the pinions of the Napoleonic eagle. The hall was crowded with young men, corps-studenten being especially numerous, robust youths in caps and badges, and many of the faces were patched and scarred from duels in the Hirsch-Gasse. Von Treitschke, a dark, energetic figure, was received with great respect. Deafness, from which he suffered, affected somewhat his delivery. He told the story of the great battle, the frantic effort against combined Europe of the crippled French, the defection of the Saxons in the midst of the fight, the final driving of Napoleon across the Elster, the death of Poniatowski and the retreat to France. His voice was a deep, sonorous monotone and every syllable was caught eagerly by his auditors. They and the speaker were thoroughly at one in their intense German feeling. It was a celebration of triumph of the Fatherland. The significance of it all was not apparent, that sunny spring morning, but we were on the eve of a catastrophe which apparently no one foreboded; Metz, Gravelotte, and Sedan were only a few months away. The fire which I saw burning so hot in the souls of both speaker and hearers was part of the conflagration destined to consume widely and thoroughly before the summer closed.
Ernst Curtius was probably the most distinguished Hellenist of his time. He had studied the Greeks on their own soil and gone with German thoroughness into their literature, history, and art. He had excellent powers of presentment, wrote exhaustively and yet attractively and won early recognition. He was selected for the post of tutor to the Crown Prince, an honour of the highest. The Crown Prince, afterwards Emperor Frederick, held him in high regard and in 1870 his position in the world of scholars was of the best. I had the honour to pay him a visit in his home one pleasant Sunday afternoon in company with Bancroft. I remember Bancroft's crisp German enunciation as he presented me; "Ich stelle Ihnen einen Amerikaner vor," and he mentioned my name. I bowed and felt my hand grasped cordially in a warm, well-conditioned palm, while a round, genial face beamed good-naturedly. The interview was in the Professor's handsome garden, his accomplished wife and daughters were of the party, and I remember Maiwein with pretzels on a lawn with rose-bushes close beside and music coming through the open windows of the house. The hospitality was graceful, there was no profound talk but only pleasant chatter. The daughters were glad to have a chance to try their English and I was glad for the moment to slip out of the foreign bond and disport myself for their benefit in my vernacular, but the Professor needed no practice. His English was quite adequate, as, on the other hand, the German of Bancroft was well in hand.
"What other university people would you like to see?" said Bancroft to me one day. I mentioned von Ranke, Lepsius, and Mommsen as men whose names were familiar, whose faces I should like to look upon.
"Find out the sprech-stunden of these men," said Bancroft to his secretary, and presently a slip was put into my hand containing the hours at which I could be conveniently received. Following the direction, I was one day admitted to the library of von Ranke, a plain apartment walled by books from floor to ceiling, with a desk well-worn by days and nights of work. As I awaited his entrance the facts of his career were vivid in my mind. He was a man of seventy-five and had been a scholar almost from his cradle. He was known to me particularly through his history of the popes, which was and perhaps is still the judicial authority with regard to the line of pontiffs, but that was only one book among many. He belonged to a class of which Germany has been prolific, whose consciences assault them if they let their pens lie idle, and who have no recourse in self-defence but building about themselves a barricade of books. After researches in various fields, von Ranke now was undertaking a history of the world, with no thought apparently of a probable touch from the dart of death in the near future; and he did indeed live until nearly ninety and long produced a volume a year.
He entered presently from an inner room, rather a short, well-rounded figure with a face marked by a clear eye and much vivacity. He conversed well in English and was curious about American education and offered, rather ludicrously, I remember, to exchange the publications of the University of Berlin with those of the little fresh-water college in which I was at that time a young teacher. Could the scholar be aiming a sly sarcastic hit at the bareness of our educational outposts in the West? But no, his frank look and voice showed that he was unaware of the real conditions. The talk was not long, there was a hearty expression of regard for Mr. Bancroft who was fully accepted by the German learned world as one of their Gelehrten , trained as he had been in youth in their schools, and in that day our best-known historian. I bowed myself out respectfully from the presence of the little man and sincerely hope that the merit of his great history is in no way abated because I took a half-hour of his time.
I met Lepsius, the great Egyptian scholar, one afternoon in his garden, a hale, straight man of sixty with abundant grey hair surmounting a fine forehead, with blue eyes full of penetration behind his spectacles. I had little knowledge of the subject he had studied so profoundly and almost laughed outright when his pretty daughter asked me if I had read her father's translation of the Book of the Dead . Of von Ranke's themes I thought I knew something and was more at ease with him, as with Mommsen whom I met about the same time.
Theodor Mommsen, more than any other, forty years ago, was the leading historian of Germany. He began his career as a student of law, in the antiquities of which he became thoroughly versed. In particular Justinian and the Roman authorities, among whom he stands as chief, were the objects of Mommsen's research. From jurisprudence he passed to the study of general history, and of the most interesting period of Rome he absorbed into his mind all the lore that has survived. This he digested and set forth in a monumental work, which, translated into English, has been, in the English-speaking world of scholars at least, as familiar as household words. At a still later time he was an active striver in the political agitations of his day.
I sent in my card to Mommsen with some trepidation and was at once admitted. I found him sitting at leisure among his books and Bancroft's introduction brought to pass for me a genial welcome. He was a man not large in frame with dark eyes, and black hair streaked with grey. No doubt but that like German scholars in general he could talk English, but he stuck to German and I was rather glad he did so; I could take him in better as he discoursed fluently in his mother-tongue. Mommsen was a man of sharp corners who often in his political career brought grief to adversaries who tried to handle him without gloves. I was fortunate in catching him in a softer mood and witnessed an amiability with which he was not usually credited. His little daughters were in the room, pretty children with whom the father played with evident pride and joy, interrupting the conversation to caress the curly pates, and trotting them on his knee. He put keen questions to me as regards America, showing that while busy with Caesar and the on-goings of the ancient forum he had been wide awake also to modern happenings. He expressed much regard for Bancroft and praised Grant for selecting as minister to Germany a personality so agreeable to European scholars. He told me of the jubilee of Bancroft which was about to be celebrated with marked honours. Fifty years before Bancroft had "made his doctor" at Göttingen, one of the earliest Americans to achieve that distinction, and the German universities meant to show emphatically their recognition of his merit. The celebration afterwards took place, not interrupted by the warlike uproar in which the land was about to be involved. A proud honour indeed for the American minister. It was a noteworthy occasion to talk thus familiarly with one of the most illustrious scholars of the time, and I recall fondly the pleasant details of the picture.
At Heidelberg the February before I had had an interview with Schenkel, then the leading theologian of that university. Him I found in his Studir-Zimmer without fire on a cold day. He seemed to scorn the use of the Kachelofen , the great porcelain stove, and was wrapped from head to foot in a heavy woollen robe which enveloped him and was prolonged about his head into a kind of cowl. He presented a figure closely like the portraits of some old reformers heavily mantled in a garb approaching the monkish Tracht which they had forsaken. It seemed out of character for Schenkel, for he was an avowed liberal and particularly far away from old standards, but the sharp winter drove a champion of heterodoxy into this outer conformity with the old. In the case of the Berlin Gelehrten , however, the mediaeval dress was quite discarded. I chanced to see them in the spring with their windows wide open to the perfume of gardens and songs of nightingales, and in the case of Mommsen, my picture of his environment has traits of geniality, for he sat in light summer attire, his face aglow with fatherly impulses as he played in the soft air with his children.
One of the most interesting men whom I met in Berlin was Hermann Grimm, then just rising among the characters of mark, but best known at that time as the son of the famous Wilhelm Grimm and the nephew of Jakob Grimm,—the "Brothers Grimm," whose names through their connection with the fairy tales are stamped in the memories not only of men and women, but of children throughout the civilised world. The "Brothers Grimm," it must be remembered, were scholars of the profoundest. The Teutonic folk-lore engaged them not simply or mainly as a source of amusement, but as a subject proper for deep investigation. They painfully gathered in out-of-the-way nooks from the lips of old grandames in chimney corners and wandering singers in obscure villages, the survivals of the primitive superstitions of the people. These they subjected to scientific study as illustrating the evolution of society, a deep persistent search with results elaborately systematised, of which the delightful tales so widely circulated are only a by-product. Aside from their service in the field of folk-lore they grappled with many another mighty task. The vast dictionary, in which German words are not only set down in their present meaning but followed throughout every stage of their etymology with their relations to their congeners in other tongues indefatigably traced out, is a marvel of erudition. Theirs also was the great Deutsche Grammatik , a philosophical setting forth of the German tongue in its connection with its far-spreading Aryan affinities. The "Brothers Grimm" were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they are not divided. Jakob was never married. Wilhelm was married, the child of the union being the distinguished man with whom it was my fortune to talk.
They worked together affectionately until far into old age, and I have described their graves in the Matthai Kirchhof where they lie side by side.
I found Hermann Grimm in the study which had been the workshop through long years of his father and uncle. He was a handsome man in his vigorous years and had married the daughter of Bettine von Arnim, the Bettine of Goethe. It is not strictly right to class him as a historian. He was poet, playwright, critic, and novelist, perhaps mainly these, but soon after, in his position as a professor in the university, he was to produce his well-known Vorlesungen über Göthe , a work which though mainly critical, at the present time is a biography of conspicuous merit, which envisages the events of a famous epoch. I may, therefore, properly include him here, though the wide range of his activities makes it difficult to place him accurately. It paved the way for our interview that I knew Ralph Waldo Emerson, of whom he was, in Germany, the special admirer and student. He had just translated Emerson into German and sat at the feet of the Concord sage, infused by his inspiration. Hermann Grimm had never seen Emerson, and listened eagerly to such details as I could give him of his personality. He dwelt with enthusiasm upon passages in poems and essays by which he had been especially kindled, and hung upon my account of the voice and refined outward traits of the teacher whom he so reverenced. I afterwards procured a fine photograph of Hermann Grimm which I sent to Emerson. A kind letter from him, which I still treasure, let me know that I had put Emerson deeply in my debt; up to that time he had never seen a portrait of his German disciple, though the two men had been in affectionate correspondence. At a later time they met and cemented a friendship which was very dear to both. Hermann Grimm showed me with pride the relics of his father and uncle; the rows of well-thumbed volumes; the wellscored Heften over which their hands had moved; their inkstands and pens; the rough arm-chairs and tables where they had sat. I think a trace from the smoke of their pipes and midnight lamp still adhered to the ceiling, and possibly cobwebs still hung in the corners of the bookcases which had been there from an ancient day.
Quaint portraits of the "Brothers Grimm" at work in their caps and rough dressing-gowns were at hand, but Hermann Grimm had rather the appearance of a well-groomed man of the world. His coat was fashionable, his abundant hair and flowing beard were carefully trimmed. He was not a recluse, though faithful to his heredity and devoted mainly to scholarly research. He was at ease in the clubs and also at Court and enjoyed the give and take of a social hour with friends.
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 buttoned 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 Schäfer putzte sich zum Tanz." This he gave with exquisite modulation, dwelling upon the refrain at the end of each stanza, "Juchhé, Juchhé, 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 class poem to write, I based upon it my composition, devoting to it far too assiduously 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-space 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-fashioned 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 unobserved 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 bass, afterward became a zealous Catholic, dying in Rome as Chamberlain in the Vatican of Pope Leo XIII. Horace Howard Furness was the principal 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 space, 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 multitudes 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 sturdy 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 pronounced 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 Association 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 grass 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, nobler than the last
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine out-grown shell
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 slashing 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 noblest. Those who came into close connection with him say that he grew morbidly fastidious, shrinking from coarse 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 chores 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 shore, 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 worship) was startled by the news that a West India ship 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 quantity of sugar, piling it on the shore 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 twang 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 class 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 noble one. A multitude 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 God , the oration and the impressive prayer of Phillips Brooks were finished. The assembly 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 space. 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 sturdy body. His manner was not impassioned, he read from a manuscript 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 passages, 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 space 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 editorship. 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 twanged 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 passed 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. 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 spacious heavens after a loved soul that had passed 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 association with the town of Concord. My first American ancestor, landing from his ship 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 associated 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 , Thoreau 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.
Thoreau 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. Thoreau 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 Thoreau 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 surpassed 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 Thoreau was the pioneer of nature-study. Audubon had preceded him but he worked mainly with the brush; to multitudes Thoreau opened the gate to the secrets of our natural environment. The subtle delicacy of the grass-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 multitudes of children with her fine humanity. She was a stately handsome woman with a most gracious and unobtrusive 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 competitor, 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 participant. 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 associations 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, dicker 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 passing. 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 passage 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 passing 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 passages 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 passionate 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 passages 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 associated 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 entity, 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-butter 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 fashion 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 Grass , 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 associations. 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 principal 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 passages 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 embarrassment 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.
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 butter 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, shielding 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, Thoreau'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 class, 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 class-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 Institute of 1770, matured, however, into noble 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 class, 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 lustrous. 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 manuscript 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 bass-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 passed. 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 Agassiz, 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 rôle 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 association 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 multitudes, 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 classmates, 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 comradeship. So it always was as we met transiently while the decades passed 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 multitudes that felt the power of his impassioned 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 ship. 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 noble 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 God who gave it." I never heard that voice again.
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 Association, 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 gräfler , 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 amusement 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 analysed or spectrolised, and a certain knowledge was shed of what was burning there in the immensely distant spaces. We can know what constitutes a star as unerringly as we know the constituents 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 analysis, 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 associate, the chemist Bunsen, when there was mention of spectrum-analysis; 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 spaces 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, massive 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 passed along the street. It was the illustrious 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 spaces 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 noble 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 institution. 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 manuscripts 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 friendship.
Divinity Hall, at Harvard University, has always had a pleasant seclusion. Near the end of its long, well-shaded avenue, it had in the rear the fine trees of Norton's Woods, and fifty years ago pleasant fields stretching before. Of late the Ampelopsis has taken it into its especial cherishing, draping it with a close green luxuriance that can scarcely be matched elsewhere. Moreover it is dominated by the lordly pile of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy. "Whence and what art thou, execrable shape!" a theologue once exclaimed as the walls were rising, feeling that there must always be a battle between what the old Hall stood for and the new building was to foster. But the structures have gone on in harmony, and many a devotee of science has had hospitable welcome in the quarters intended for the recruits of what so many suppose to be the opposing camp. There was a notable case of this kind in my own time.
One pleasant afternoon a group of "divinities" (Ye gods, that that should have been our title in the nomenclature of the University!) were chatting under one of the western porches. Talk turned upon an instructor, whose hand upon our essays was felt to be soft rather than critical, and who was, therefore, set low. "By Holy Scripture," broke out one, "a soft hand is a good thing. A soft hand, sir, turneth away wrath." The window close by opened into the room of Simon Newcomb, a youth who had no part in our studies, but of whom we made a chum. In those days he could laugh at such a joke as it blew in at his window with the thistle-down,—indeed was capable of such things himself.
It is a bit odd that as I come to write of him, this small witticism of half a century back should thrust itself obstinately into my memory, but after all it may not be out of place. The impression of the greatness of a mountain we get powerfully if the eye can measure it from the waif of seaweed at low tide up to the snow-cap of the summit. At this and similar jokes the boy Simon Newcomb connived, as he moved in our crowd. They were the waifs at low tide from which his towering mind rose to the measuring of the courses of the stars. He came among us as a student of the Lawrence scientific school, muscular and heavy-shouldered from work on shore and at the oar in Nova Scotia. Though not slovenly, he was the reverse of trim. His rather outlandish clothes, pressed once for all when they left the shop of the provincial tailor, held his sturdy elbows and knees in bags moulded accurately to the capacious joints. His hair hung rebelliously, and his nascent beard showed an untrained hand at the razor. But his brow was broad, his eye clear and intelligent, and he was a man to be reckoned with. He was barely of age, but already a computer in the Nautical Almanac office, then located at Cambridge, and we well knew work of that sort required brains of the best. Since Simon Newcomb's death an interesting story has been told about his heredity. His strong-brained father, measuring his own qualities with rigid introspection, discovering where he was weak and where capable resolved that whatever wife he chose should supplement in her personality the points to which he lacked. He would father sons and daughters who should come into the world well appointed; in particular he looked toward offspring who should possess high scientific gifts. With this mind he set out on his courting, and steering clear of vain entanglements with rather preternatural coolness, at last in a remote village, satisfied himself that he had found his complement. He permitted his docile heart to fall in love, and in due course there was born into the world a great man. The wooing has a humorous aspect,—this steering of unruly Hymen! The calculated result, however, did not fail of appearance, and perhaps the world might profit from such an example. I was strongly drawn toward Simon Newcomb by his unlikeness to myself. I was town-bred and he full of strength gained in the fields and along the beach. My own disinclination for mathematics was marked, but I had a vast admiration for a man to whom its processes were easy. We became very good friends. He was a genial fellow, capable as I have said of taking or making a joke, yet his moods were prevailingly serious, and he had already hitched his waggon to a star. Abnormally purposeful perhaps, a cropping out no doubt of heredity, he had set a high mark for himself and was already striving toward it. In an autobiographical fragment he says, referring to his early surrender of his powers to high mathematical work:
To this work I was especially attracted, because its preparation seemed to me to embody the highest intellectual power to which man has ever attained. The matter used to present itself to my mind somewhat in this way…. There are tens of thousands of men who could be successful in all the ordinary walks of life. Thousands who could gain wealth, hundreds who could wield empires, for one who could take up the astronomical problems with any hope of success. The men who have done it are therefore in intellect the select few of the human race, an aristocracy ranking above all others in the scale of being. The astronomical ephemeris is the last practical outcome of their productive genius.
In pursuing their lives men no doubt follow the line of least resistance, and Simon Newcomb here we may be sure was no exception; thus he chose to deal in his work with the heaviest and most perplexing problems with which the human intellect can engage. I do not attempt to describe or estimate what he achieved. Only a few select minds in his generation were capable of that. At his death the tributes of those who had a right to speak were unmeasured. Perhaps no human mind ever attacked more boldly the uttermost difficulties, and indeed have been more successful in the wrestle. He was set by the side of Hipparchus, of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Sir Isaac Newton. In a class thus lofty, his scientific fellows have judged that he had a title to stand. In their high strivings he was equally zealous, and his achievement was comparable with theirs. Nevertheless, had his disposition inclined him, there were many other paths into which he might have struck with success. His versatility was marked and he did try his hand at various tasks, at finance, political economy, belles-lettres. James Bryce, who knew him well, is said to have seen in him the stuff for a great man-of-affairs, a leader of armies or a captain of industry. His excursions, however, into such fields, though sometimes noteworthy in result, were transient and more or less half-hearted. His allegiance, given so early to the sublimest of pursuits, held him to the end. The Government of the United States placed him in its highest scientific position, at the head of the Naval Observatory, and his serious work from first to last was in the solemn labyrinths where the stars cross and re-cross, and here he was one of the most masterful of master-minds.
It was full fifty years since Simon Newcomb and I were boys together in Divinity Hall. No letter or message had ever passed between us. I had followed the course of his fame, and felt happy that I had once known him. Returning to my lodgings, during a sojourn in Washington, I was told I had had a visitor, a man well on in years, plain in attire, and rugged-faced. The card he left bore the name "Simon Newcomb." I sought him out at once, and have rarely felt more honoured than that my old friend, learning casually of my whereabouts, had felt the impulse to find me and renew our former intercourse. After a half-century the boy was still discernible in the aging man. The big brow remained and the keen and thoughtful eye. His dress and manner were simple, as of old. He was entitled to wear the insignia of a rear-admiral, and had long lived in refined surroundings which might have made him fastidious. In look and bearing, however, he was the hearty, friendly man of the Nova Scotia coast, careless of frills and fine manners.
It was a red-letter day for me when Simon Newcomb met me at the door of the Cosmos Club, of which he was then president, and presented me as his guest to one and another of the select company of men who formed its membership. He moved among them as unostentatious and simple-mannered as he had been as a boy, with a catholic interest in all the varying topics which held the sympathies of the crowd, and able well to hold his own whatever might be the field of the conversation. Bishop, poet, scientist, historian, he had common ground with them all. I sat with him in his study, among heaped-up papers inscribed with the most abstruse and intricate calculations. It did not affect the warmth of his welcome that I had no partnership with him in these difficult pursuits. He was broad enough to take cognizance, too, of the things I cared for. It was hard to feel that the man there hitting off aptly a prominent personality or historic event mooted in our little human world was at the same time in the planetary confidences, and that when you shook his hand at parting, he would turn to interpreting the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the mysteries of the bands that hold Orion. Coming home from an interview with Simon Newcomb, late at night I paused on the terrace at the west front of the Capitol and looked back upon the heavens widely stretching above the city. The stars glittered cold, far, and silent, but I had been with a man who in a sense walked and talked with them and found them sympathetic. In the power of pure intellect I felt I had never known a greater man.
On an autumn day in the early fifties, as I loitered in the green-house of the Botanic Garden at Cambridge, a lithe bare-headed man, in rough brown attire, came quickly stepping in from the flower-beds outside. He was in his fullest vigour, his hair more inclined to stand erect than to lie smooth, his dark eyes full of animation. It was a noticeably vivid and alert personality, and as he tossed on to a working-table a heavy sheaf of long-stemmed plants, wet from a recent shower and bent over them in sharp scrutiny, I knew I was in the presence of Asa Gray, the first of American botanists. He had come as a boy from a remote rural district, and with few advantages, following the bent of a marked scientific genius, he had won for himself before reaching middle life a leading place. I was soon to know him better, for it was my fortunate lot to be one in the crowd of juniors which for a term lined up before him once a week or so in Holden Chapel. The small peculiarities of great men have an interest, and the function I am seeking now to fulfil is to make sharp the ordinary presentment of the eminent characters I touch. I recall of Asa Gray, that with the class, he sat at his desk behind a substantial rail, which fenced him in from the boys in the front row, his seat a little raised and the notes before him made plain by a narrow light-well, which in the Holden of those days opened over the teacher's head to a sky-light in the roof. Gray's utterance was rather hesitant. He would catch for his word often, reiterating meanwhile the article, "the-a, the-a, the-a," his gaze meanwhile fixed upon the sky-light, and a nervously gyrating forefinger raised high and brightly illuminated. The thought suggested was that he had a prompter on the roof to whom he was distressfully appealing to supply the true phrase. For Professor Gray the truth was in the top rather than the bottom of the well. Though sometimes long in coming it was the right thing when it came and clothed his thought properly. Sizing up the new professor, in our first days with him, as boys will do, some unconscionable dogs in our front row, assuming an attitude which Abraham Lincoln afterward made classic, settled back in their chairs and rested their feet on the rail in front in a position higher than their heads. The professor, withdrawing his gaze suddenly from the sky-light, found himself confronted not by expectant faces but by a row of battered and muddy boot-soles. His face fell; his whirling forefinger, ceasing to gyrate, tilted like a lance in rest at the obnoxious cowhide parapet. "Those boots, young gentlemen, ah, those boots"; he ejaculated forlornly, and the boots came down with mutinous clatter. Professor Gray soon established himself as a prime favourite among our lazy men, of whom there were too many. In calling us up he began with the A's, following down the class in alphabetic regularity. While Brooks was reciting, it was easy for Brown, sitting next, to open his book, and calculating narrowly the parallax, to hold it concealed below the rail, while he diligently conned the page following. In his turn he rose well-primed, and spouted glibly, and so on down the class. Rumour went that our childlike professor declared he had never known anything like it. Nearly every man got the perfect mark. This was a fiction. The professor's idea was that we were old enough to know what was good for us, and ought to be above childish negligence and tricks. If some men saw no use in botany, he would not waste time in beating it into them. He left the blind and the sluggards in their wilful ignorance, but had generously helpful hands for all wiser ones who saw the value of trimming their lamps. All such he would take to his garden personally to direct and inspire, and our better men felt all through their lives how much that meant. In general we soon came to feel and appreciate a most kindly influence as proceeding from him. I think we had no teacher whom we at the last regarded more affectionately or approached more closely; and many an indolent one was won to warm interest and diligence.
Those were the days when the older science was rocking to its foundations in a re-shaping at the hands of new and brilliant men. Faraday, we might have heard of, but Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and the rest, were names all unknown, as were also the revolutionary ideas, the conservation and correlation of forces, the substitution of evolution in the scheme of the universe for the plan of special creations. Here all unconsciously we were in contact with a man who was in the thick of the new scientific movement, the friend and partner in their strivings of the daring new interpreters of the ways of God to men, and who was to have recognition as a specially effective apostle of the new dispensation. Abraham himself entertained his angel no more unawares than we, but gleams of fine radiance sometimes broke through even to our purblind perceptions. Once unfurling a quite too long and heedless pair of ears to what I supposed would be a dull technical deliverance, I found myself suddenly caught and wonderfully stimulated.
What [said Asa Gray] is the bright flame and vivid heat that is set free on your hearth when you kindle your piles of wood? It is the sunlight and sun-heat of a century ago. The beams were caught in the wilderness by the leaves of the trees; they were absorbed and stored in the trunks, and the light and heat day by day through many years was thus heaped up. When now combustion begins, it is simply a setting free of the radiance that was shed upon the forest many years ago. The noons of a time long past are making you comfortable in the wintry storm of the present. So when the anthracite glows in your grate, you feel the veritable sunbeams that were emitted aeons upon aeons ago upon the primeval world. It is the very light that was drunk in by those most ancient forests. It was held fast in the trunks, and when those faithful reservoirs in their turn were crushed and commingled and drenched until at last they lay under the earth as the coal beds, they nevertheless held fast this treasure. When you scratch your match you but unlock the hoard, and the sunlight of primeval days, diminished by no particle, glows and warms once more.
This in substance was Asa Gray's introduction from which he went on to explain that in the progress of the universe no faintest throb of energy is lost. It might pass from form to form; heat might appear as a mode of motion, of weight, of elasticity, but no smallest unit perished. So the lecture flowed on into a luminous and comprehensive exposition of the great doctrine of the conservation and correlation of force. It was Asa Gray who brought us into touch with this new science just then announcing itself to the world. He was a co-worker and a compeer of the pioneers who at that moment were breaking a way for it, and it was our privilege to sit at the feet of a master.
In later years his fame spread wide. He was recognised as the leader in America in his special field, and in a class with the best men of foreign lands. He was long a correspondent and special friend of Darwin, to the spread of whose doctrines he rendered great service. The fact that religiously he adhered to the time-honoured evangelical tenets helped much in the war which the new science was forced to wage with the odium theologicum . The new science, it must be said, perhaps has hardly yet made sure its footing. Are Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest clews with which we can face confidently the workings of the "roaring-gloom that weaves for God the garment we see him by"? But no doctrine is better accepted than that in some way Evolution and not Special Creations is the scheme of the world. Toward this acceptance Asa Gray helped powerfully, a champion always bold, humane, broad-minded. We used to laugh about the prompter he seemed to have at the top of the light-well in the sky-light in Holden Chapel. In a deeper sense than we knew the good man received his prompting from the clear upper sky.
A naturalist who sixty years ago had, and perhaps still has, a much wider fame than Asa Gray was Louis Agassiz. He had come a few years before from Europe, a man in his prime, of great fame. He was strikingly handsome, with a dome-like head under flowing black locks, large dark, mobile eyes set in features strong and comely, and with a well-proportioned stalwart frame. At the moment his prestige was greater, perhaps, than that of any other Harvard professor. His knowledge seemed almost boundless. His glacial theory had put him among the geological chiefs, and as to animated nature he had ordered and systematised, from the lowest plant-forms up to the crown of creation, the human being. Abroad we knew he was held to be an adept in the most difficult fields and now in his new environment he was pushing his investigations with passionate zeal. But the boys found in him points on which a laugh could be hung. As he strode homeward from his walks in the outer fields or marshes, we eyed him gingerly, for who could tell what he might have in his pockets? Turtles, tadpoles, snakes, any old monster might be there, and queer stories prevailed of the menagerie which, hung up, and forgotten in the professor's dressing-room, crept out and sought asylum in the beds, shoes, and hats of the household. Before the resulting consternation, masculine and feminine, he was always apologetic. He was on the friendliest terms with things ill-reputed, even abhorrent, and could not understand the qualms of the delicate. He was said to have held up once, in all innocence, before a class of school-girls a wriggling snake. The shrieks and confusion brought him to a sense of what he had done. He apologised elaborately, the foreign peculiarity he never lost running through his confusion. "Poor girls, I vill not do it again. Next time I vill bring in a nice, clean leetle feesh." Agassiz took no pleasure in shocking his class; on the contrary he was most anxious to engage and hold them. So too, if his audience was made up from people of the simplest. In fact, for each he exerted his powers as generously as when addressing a company of savants. He always kindled as he spoke, and with a marvellous magnetism communicated his glow to those who listened. I have seen him stand before his class holding in his hand the claw of a crustacean. In his earnestness it seemed to be for him the centre of the creation, and he made us all share his belief. Indeed, he convinced us. Running back from it in an almost infinite series was the many-ordered life adhering at last and scarcely distinguishable from the inorganic matter to which it clung. Forward from it again ran the series not less long and complicated which fulfilled itself at last in the brain and soul of man. What he held in his hand was a central link. His colour came and went, his eye danced and his tones grew deep and tremulous, as he dwelt on the illimitable chain of being. With a few strokes on the blackboard, he presented graphically the most intricate variations. He felt the sublimity of what he was contemplating, and we glowed with him from the contagion of his fervour. I have never heard his equal as an expounder of the deep things of nature. He gloried in the exercise of his power, though hampered by poverty. "I have no time to make money," he cried. He sought no title but that of teacher. To do anything else was only to misuse his gift. In his desk he was an inspirer, but hardly more so than in private talk. I recall walks we took with him to study natural objects and especially the striated rocks, which, as he had detected, bore plain evidence that the configuration of the region had been shaped by glaciers. He was charmingly affable, encouraging our questions, and unwearied in his demonstration. "Professor," I said once, "you teach us that in creation things rise from high to higher in the vast series until at last we come to man. Why stop with man? why not conclude that as man surpasses what went before, so he in turn will be surpassed and supplanted by a being still superior;—and so on and on?" I well recall the solemnity of his face as he replied that I was touching upon the deepest things, not to be dealt with in an afternoon ramble. He would only say then that there could be nothing higher than a man with his spirit.
Whether Agassiz was as broad-minded as he was high-minded may be argued. The story ran that when the foundations of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy were going on in Divinity Avenue, a theological professor encountering the scientist among the shadows the latter was invading, courteously bade him welcome. He hoped the old Divinity Hall would be a good neighbour to the pile rising opposite. "Yes," was the bluff reply, "and I hope to see the time when it will be turned into a dormitory for my scientific students." They were quickly spoken, unmeditated words without intention of rudeness, but wrapped in his specialty he was rather careless as to what he might shoulder out. Again, we had in our company a delicate, nervous fellow who turned out to be a spiritualistic medium, and who was soon subjected to an investigation in which professors took part, which was certainly rough and ready. Agassiz speedily came to the conclusion that the young man was an impostor and deserved no mercy. Some of us felt that the determination was hasty. There was a possibility of honest self-deception; and then who could say that the mysteries had been fathomed that involved the play of the psychic forces? Possibly a calmer and more candid mood might have befitted the investigation. At any rate in these later days such a mood has been maintained by inquirers like William James and the Society for Psychical Research. These are straws, but it is hardly a straw that when Darwinism emerged upon the world, winning such speedy and almost universal adherence among scientific men and revolutionising in general the thought of the world as to the method of creation, Agassiz stood almost solitary among authorities rejecting evolution and clinging to the doctrine of a special calling into being of each species. His stand against the new teaching was definite and bold, but can it be called broad-minded? This is but the limitation that makes human a greatness which the world regards with thorough and affectionate reverence. Fortunate are those in whose memories live the voice and countenance of Louis Agassiz.
Those whose privilege it was to know both father and son will be slow to admit that the elder Agassiz was the greater man. Alexander (to his intimates he was always, affectionately, Alex), was a teacher only transiently, and I believe never before a class showed the enkindling power which in the father was so marked a gift. His attainments, however, were probably not less great, and it remains to be seen whether his discoveries were not as epoch-making. He possessed, moreover, a versatility which his father never showed (perhaps because he never took time to show it), standing as a brilliant figure among financiers and captains of industry. Finally, in a high sense, Alexander was a philanthropist, and his benefactions were no more munificent than they were wisely applied; for he watched well his generous hand, guiding the flow into channels where it might most effectually revive and enrich. While possibly in the case of the elder Agassiz, the recognition of truth was sometimes unduly circumscribed, that could never be said of Alexander. He was eminently broad-minded, estimating with just candour whatever might be advanced in his own field, and outside of his field, entering with sympathetic interest into all that life might present.
I recall him first on a day soon after our entrance into college in 1851. A civic celebration was to take place in Boston, and the Harvard students were to march in the procession. That day I first heard Fair Harvard , sonorously rendered by the band at the head of our column, as we formed on the Beacon Street mall before the State House. A boy of sixteen, dressed in gray, came down the steps to take his place in our class—a handsome fellow, brown-eyed, and dark-haired, trimly built, and well-grown for his years. His face had a foreign air, and when he spoke a peculiarity marked his speech. This he never lost, but it was no imperfection. Rather it gave distinction to his otherwise perfect English. In the years of our course, we met daily. He was a good general scholar but with a preference from the first for natural science and mathematics. He matured into handsome manhood, and as an athlete was among the best. He was a master of the oar, not dropping it on graduation, but long a familiar figure on the Charles. Here incidentally he left upon the University a curious and lasting mark. The crew one day were exercising bare-headed on the Back Bay, when encountering stress of weather, Agassiz was sent up into the city to find some proper head-gear. He presently returned with a package of handkerchiefs of crimson, which so demonstrated their convenience and played a part on so many famous occasions, that crimson became the Harvard colour.
Alexander was soon absorbed in the whirl of life, and to what purpose he worked I need not here detail. The story of the Calumet and Hecla Company is a kind of commercial romance which the harshest critics of American business life may read with pleasure. At the same time Agassiz was only partially and transiently a business-man, returning always with haste from the mine and the counting-room to the protracted scientific researches in which his heart mainly lay. His voyages in the interest of science were many and long. He studied not so much the shores as the sea itself. Oceanographer is the term perhaps by which he may best be designated. By deep sea soundings he mapped the vast beds over which the waters roll and reached an intimacy with the life of its most profound abysses. Sitting next him at a class dinner, an affair of dress-suits, baked meats, and cigars at the finish, I found his talk took one far away from the prose of the thing. He was charming in conversation, and he set forth at length his theory as to the work of the coral insects, formed after long study of the barrier reefs and atolls of remote seas. His ideas were subversive of those of Darwin, with whom he disputed the matter before Darwin died. They are now well-known and I think accepted, though unfortunately he died before setting them forth in due order. They are revolutionary in their character as to the origin of formations that enter largely into the crust of the earth. In this field he stood as originator and chief. He gave me glimpses of the wonderful indeed, as we cracked our almonds and sipped the sherbet, his rich voice and slightly foreign accent running at my ear as we sat under the banquet lights.
Though oceanography was his special field, his tastes and attainments were comprehensive and he was a man of repute in many ways. He was a trained and skilled engineer and mathematician, and an adept in the most various branches of natural science. At another class dinner, when I was so fortunate as to sit beside him, his interest in botany came out as he spoke of the enjoyment he took in surveying from the roof of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy the trees of Cambridge, the masses of foliage here and there appearing from that point in special beauty. I spoke of the paper just read by Francis Darwin, the son of Charles, before the British Association, emphasising the idea that the life of plants and animals differs not in kind but only in degree. Plants may have memory, perhaps show passion, predatory instincts, or rudimentary intelligence. The plant-world is therefore part and parcel of animated nature. Agassiz announced with real fervour his adherence to that belief and cited interesting facts in its support. Subtle links binding plant and animal reveal themselves everywhere to investigation. In evolution from the primeval monads, or whatever starting-points there were, the fittest always survived as the outpoured life flowed abundantly along the million lines of development. There was a brotherhood between man and not only the zoöphyte, but still further down, even with the ultimate cell in which organisation can first be traced, only faintly distinguishable from the azoic rock on which it hangs.
As he talked I thought of the ample spaces of his Museum where the whole great scheme is made manifest to the eye, the structure of man, then the slow gradation downward, the immense series of flowers and plants counterfeited in glass continuing the line unbroken, down to the ultimate lichen, all but part and parcel of the ledge to which it clings.
My tastes were not in the direction of mathematics or natural science, and it was not until our later years that we came into close touch. In the hospice of the Grimsel, in the heart of the Alps, as I sat down to dinner after a day of hard walking, I saw my classmate in a remote part of the room with his wife and children and a group of Swiss friends. I determined not to intrude, but as the dinner ended, coming from his place he sought me out. "I heard your voice," he said, "and knew you were here before I saw you." We chatted genially. That day, he said, he had visited the site of his father's hut on the Aar glacier, where the observations were made on which was based the glacial theory. On that visit he had, as a small boy, been carried up in a basket on the back of a guide. He had not been there since until that day. He was that night in the environment into which he had been born, and assumed toward me the attitude of a host making at home a stranger guest. To my question as to how a transient passer like myself could best see a great ice river, he replied, "Climb to-morrow the Aeggisch-horn, and look down from there upon the Aletsch glacier. You will have under your eye all the more interesting and important phenomena relating to the matter." We parted next morning. I had enjoyed a great privilege, for he was the man of all men to meet in such a place,—a feeling deepened a day or two later, when I looked down from the peak he had indicated upon this wide-stretching glacier below.
As age drew on he mellowed well. Perhaps sympathy with men and things outside his special walk was no stronger than in earlier years, but it had readier expression. I heard from him this good story. President Eliot was once showing about the university a multimillionaire and his wife who had the good purpose to endow a great school of learning in the West. Having made the survey, they stood in Memorial Hall, about to say good-bye. "Well, Mr. Eliot," said the wife, "How much money have you invested?" Mr. Eliot stated to her the estimated value of the university assets. The lady turning to her husband, exclaimed, with a touch of the feeling that money will buy everything, "Oh, husband, we can do better than that." Said Mr. Eliot, with a wave of the hand toward the ancient portraits on the walls: "Madame, we have one thing which money cannot buy,—nearly three centuries of devotedness!" There is fine appreciation of a precious possession in this remark. In other ways Harvard may be surpassed. Other institutions may easily have more money, more students. As able men may be in other faculties possibly (I will admit even this) there may be elsewhere better football. But that through eight generations there has been in the hearts of the best men, a constant all-absorbing devotion to the institution, is a thing for America unique, and which cannot be taken away. How stimulating is this to a noble loyalty in these later generations! The old college is a thing to be watchfully and tenderly shielded. As Alexander told me the story, I felt in his manner and intonation that the three centuries of devotedness had had great influence with him. As John Harvard had been the first of the liberal givers, so he was the last, and I suppose the greatest. The money value of his gifts is very large, but who will put a value upon the labour, the watchfulness, the expert guidance exercised by such a man, unrequited and almost without intermission throughout a long life! His fine nature, no doubt, prompted the consecration, but the old devotedness spurred him to emulation of those who had gone before.
In 1909 I enjoyed through Agassiz a great pleasure. He invited me to his house where I found gathered a company of his friends, many of them men of eminence. He had just returned from his journey in East Africa, during which he had penetrated far into the interior, studying with his usual diligence the natural history of the regions. He entertained us with an informal talk beautifully and profusely illustrated by photographs. I have said that he did not possess, or at any rate, never showed his father's power of kindling speech. So far as I know he never addressed large popular audiences. Nevertheless to a circle of scientific specialists, or people intelligent in a general way, he could present a subject charmingly, in clear, calm, fluent speech. On this occasion he was at his best, and it was a pleasure indeed to have the marvels of that freshly-opened land described to us by the man who of all men perhaps was best able to cope with the story. I listened with delight and awe. He was an old man crowned with the highest distinctions. I thought of the young handsome boy I had seen coming down in his grey suit into the Beacon Street mall, while the band played Fair Harvard. On the threshold I shook his hand and looked into his dark, kindly eyes. I turned away in the darkness and saw him no more.
In 1887, in pleasant June weather I left St. Louis with my family on the capacious river-packet Saint Paul , for a trip up-stream to the city for which the boat was named. The flood was at the full as we ploughed on, stopping at landings on either side, the reaches between presenting long perspectives of summer beauty. We paused in due course at a little Iowa town, and among the passengers who took the boat here were two men who excited our attention at the landing. One was a tall handsome fellow in early manhood, well-dressed and mannered, completely blind. The other was his companion, a rather dishevelled figure with neglected beard and hair setting off a face that looked out somewhat helplessly into a world strange to it, an attire of loose white wool, plainly made by some tailor who knew nothing of recent fashion-plates. A close-fitting cap of the same material surmounted his head. The attire was whole and neat, but the air of the man was slouchy and bespoke one who must have lately come from the outskirts into the life of America. The young blindman at once aroused earnest sympathy. Of the other some one remarked, "Plainly a globe-trotting Englishman, who has lost his Baedeker and by chance got in here."
Presently the boat was on its way, and as I sat facing the changing scene, I heard a shuffling, hesitating step behind, and a drawling somewhat uncertain voice asked me about the country. I replied that it was my first trip and I was ignorant. Turning full upon the querist, no other than the globe-trotter, I said: "You are an Englishman I see. I was in England last year. I have spent some time in London, and I know other parts of your country." A conversation followed which soon became to me interesting. My companion had education and intelligence, and before the afternoon ended we were agreeably in touch. He handed me his card on which was engraved the name, "Mr. William Grey." I told him I was a Harvard man, a professor in Washington University, St. Louis. He was of Exeter College, Oxford, and for some years had been a professor in Codrington College, Barbadoes, in the West Indies, whence he had lately come. To my natural surprise that he should be so far astray, he said he had been visiting a fellow Exeter man, a clergyman of the English Church, who was the rector of an Iowa parish. It further developed that his young blind companion belonged to a family in the parish, and that Mr. Grey had good-heartedly assumed the care of him during an outing on the river.
A trip from St. Louis to St. Paul by river is longer now than a trip across the Atlantic. I was nearly a week in my new companionship, and acquaintance grew and deepened fast. The young blindman, whose manners were agreeable, became a general favourite, and Mr. Grey and I found we had much in common. I mentioned to him that my errand in England the year before had been to find material for a life of Young Sir Henry Vane, the statesman and martyr of the English Commonwealth, and in his young days a governor of the province of Massachusetts Bay. This touched in him a responsive chord. He was familiar with the period and the character. He was a friend of Shorthouse whose novel, John Inglesant was a widely-read book of those days. He had helped Shorthouse in his researches for the book, and knew well the story of Charles I., and his friends and foes. He was himself a staunch Churchman, but mentioned with some pleasure that his name appeared among the Non-conformists. A sturdy noble of those days was Lord Grey of Groby, who opposed the King to the last, standing at the right hand of the redoubtable Colonel Pride at the famous "Pride's Purge," pointing out to him the Presbyterians whom the Ironside was to turn out of Parliament, in the thick of the crisis. To my inquiry as to whether Lord Grey of Groby was an ancestor, he was reticent, merely saying that the name was the same. I had begun to surmise that my new friend was allied with the Greys who in so many periods of English history have borne a famous part. Some years before, while sojourning in a little town on the Ohio River, a stroll carried me to a coal-mine in the neighbourhood. As I peered down two hundred feet into the dark shaft, a bluff, peremptory voice called to me to look out for my head. I drew back in time to escape the cage as it descended with a group of miners from a higher plane to the lower deeps. I thanked my bluff friend, who had saved my head from a bump. A pleasant acquaintance followed which led to his taking me down into the mine, a thrilling experience. He was an adventurous Englishman who had put money into a far-away enterprise, and come with his wife and children to take care of it. His wife was a lady well-born, a sister of Sir George Grey, twice governor of New Zealand, and at the time High Commissioner and governor of Cape Colony, one of the most interesting of the great English nation-makers of the South Seas. I came to know the lady, and naturally followed the career of her brother, who earned a noble reputation. Later I corresponded with him, and received from him his portrait and books. Referring to Sir George Grey in my talk with Mr. William Grey, I found that he knew him well and not long before, in a voyage of which he had made many into many seas, had visited New Zealand, and been a guest of Sir George Grey at his island-home in the harbour of Auckland. Was he related to Sir George? was my natural query. Again there was reticence. The name was the same, but the Greys were numerous.
The journey wore on. The resource of the steamer's company was to sit on the upper deck, watch the swollen river with its waifs of uprooted trees and the banks green with the summer, chatting ourselves into intimacy. The young blindman made good and very good, and his guardian, while keeping a lookout on his charge from under his well-worn traveller's cap, which I now knew had sheltered its owner in tropic hurricanes and icy Arctic blasts, discussed with me matters various and widely related. Nearing our journey's end, we sat in the moonlight, the Mississippi opening placidly before us between hazy hills. We had grown to be chums, and next morning we were to part. It was a time for confidences. "Well," said Mr. Grey, "I am going to get a good look at America, then I mean to return home and go into Parliament." I suggested there might be difficulties about that. English elections were uncertain, and how could he be at all sure that any constituency would want him. "Ah," said he, this time no longer reticent. "I am going into the House of Lords." "Indeed," said I in surprise, "and who are you really, Mr. William Grey?" At last he was outspoken. He was heir to the earldom of Stamford, his uncle the present earl, a man past eighty, childless, and in infirm health, must soon lay down the title. He was preparing himself for the responsibilities of the high position and believed it well to make a study of America. His father, a younger son, had been a clergyman in Canada, and he, though with an Oxford training, knew the world outside of England better than the old home. His direct ancestor was Lord Grey of Groby, whose father, an earl of Stamford, had been a Parliamentary commander in the years of the Civil War, and in the century before that, a flower of the house had been the Lady Jane Grey, who had perished in her youth on the scaffold, a possible heir to the English crown. So this outré personage, good-heartedly helping the blindman to an outing, and in a shy apologetic way getting into touch with an environment strange to him, was a high-born nobleman fitting himself for his dignities.
I had before invited Mr. Grey to visit me in St. Louis, for his seeming helplessness appealed to me from the first. He had met some hard rebuffs in his American contacts. I thought I might aid him in making his way. Returning in the autumn to my home, I heard from Mr. Grey that he was coming to be my guest, and in due time he arrived. I missed him at the station, but he presently appeared at our door in an express-waggon, sitting on the seat with the driver, in the midst of his belongings. He spent a week with us in the first American home he had known, and we found him an amiable and unobtrusive gentleman. He was a vigorous walker and explored the city well. His listless, seemingly inattentive eyes somehow scanned everything, and he judged well what he witnessed. He was an accomplished scholar and had a quiet humour. A little daughter half-playfully and half-wilfully, announced her intention to follow her own pleasure in a certain case. "Milicent is a Hedonist," said the guest, and the Oxford scholar brought Aristippus and Epicurus into odd conjunction with a Mississippi Valley breakfast-table. He laid aside his white woollen suit, but his attire remained unconventional, not to say outré . Even the wrinkled dress-suit in which he appeared at dinner, I think was the achievement of a tailor in the island of Barbadoes. His opera-hat was a wonder. He was, or was soon to be, a belted earl, but his belt only appeared on his pajamas, raiment of which I heard then for the first time. It had early appeared in our intercourse that the main interest of Mr. Grey lay in humane and religious work. He also was a devoted member of the Church of England. On Sunday morning we started early for the leading Episcopal Church but on the way he inquired as to the place of worship of the negro congregation of that faith. I confessed my ignorance of it, but he had in some way ascertained it, and I presently found myself following his lead down a rather squalid street where at last we came to the humble temple. Instead of hearing the bishop, a famous and eloquent man, he preferred to sit on a bare bench in the obscure little meeting-house, where he fraternised cordially with the dusky company we found there. He was more interested in our charities than in our politics and business, and in his quiet way during the week learned the story well. I introduced him to Southern friends who gave him letters to persons in the South. Provided with these he bade us good-bye at last, and went far and wide through what had been the Confederacy. He visited Jefferson Davis and many soldiers and politicians of note, getting at first-hand their point of view. I also gave him letters to some eminent men in the East, which he presented, meeting with a good reception. He made a wide and shrewd study of the United States, and I am glad to think I helped him. When I met him he was unfriended and without credentials, and his singularities were exposing him to some inconvenient jostling in our rough world. I opened some doors to him through which he pushed his way into much that was best worth seeing in American life. An old friend, a radical man of letters, wrote me afterwards that he enjoyed Mr. Grey, and he thought Mr. Grey enjoyed him although he believed that if he had been a pauper, a criminal, or even a bishop, Mr. Grey would have enjoyed him much more.
He returned to England and did not forget me, writing from time to time how his affairs progressed. Soon he entered into his own, the earldom of Stamford, finding about the same time his countess in an English vicarage. In the House of Lords he was not prominent, though the papers occasionally mentioned brief addresses by him. His main interest continued to be charitable work. He was a lay-preacher, and worked much in the east end of London, throwing the weight of his culture and high position into alleviating ignorance and poverty. He sent me interesting literature relating to the efforts of well-placed men and women to carry into slums and hovels sweetness and light. In due time a daughter was born to him, whom he named Jane Grey; and later a son, Lord Grey of Groby. I saw once in the London Graphic, or perhaps in the Illustrated News, charming pictures of these children with their interesting historic names. Though rigidly a Churchman he was not narrow. Lord Stamford sent me a handsome picture of himself, to which is affixed his signature as an earl and an elaborate seal. In an accompanying note he wrote that the seal was a careful facsimile of the one which an ancestor of his had affixed to the death-warrant of Charles I. He seemed to take pride in the fact that his forbear had borne a part in the ancient Non-conformist strivings. He came to America more than once afterward, as a delegate to charitable and peace Congresses. My dear friend Robert Treat Paine, President of the Peace Society and eminent philanthropist of Boston, knew him well and esteemed him highly—and he was the fellow of workers like him.
It is a picturesque moment in my life that I in this way came into association with a nobleman of the bluest blood. To outward appearance as I stumbled upon him so unexpectedly, he seemed effete. His odd shuffle and limp whiskers were dundrearily suggestive of a personality a bit mildewed. But I felt that what ineptitude there was, was only superficial; good, strong manhood lay underneath. His death took place some years since.
Burke's Peerage states that the family was ennobled by Richard Coeur de Lion, and has maintained itself in a high place for eight centuries. Privilege is a bough of the social tree from which we expect mere dead sea-fruit rather than a wholesome yield, but now and then the product holds something better than ashes. As we trace this stock through the ages, apples of Sodom, no doubt, will be found in abundance, but now and then it flowers into heroic manhood and lovely womanhood. My chance comrade of the St. Paul was a refined, high-purposed man, certainly a product of the worthier kind, and I am glad to count among my friends, William Grey, Ninth Earl of Stamford.
* * * * *
As a student of German, anxious to gain fluency of expression, and to train my ear to catch readily the popular idioms, I found that I must fill out my writing and reading by contact with men. After roving the streets of German cities, I packed a knapsack and set out upon the country-roads. I was, as the Germans say, gut zu Fuss , a stout walker, and I learned to employ for my longer expeditions the Bummel-Zug , an institution I commend highly to all in my situation. The Bummel-Zug is simply a "way" freight-train, to which in my time was attached a car for third-class passengers. It stopped at every village, and the fare was very low. It was convenient, therefore, for those too poor to be in a hurry, and for travellers like me whose purpose could be better served by loitering than by haste. The train proceeded leisurely, giving ample time for deliberate survey of the land, and the frequent pauses of indefinite length afforded opportunity for walks through the streets of remote hamlets and even into the country about, where the peasants with true Teuton Gemüthlichkeit always welcomed a man who came from America.
Thus on my legs and by Bummel-Zug I wandered far, arriving one pleasant day at the ancient city of Salzburg, close to the Bavarian Alps. I was anxious to see something of the Tyrol, and had been told that the Königs-See offered the finest and most characteristic scenery of that region. Salzburg was a suitable point of departure. The sky darkened and it began to rain heavily. Berchtesgaden, in the mountains, the nearest village to the Königs-See, was only to be reached by Eilwagen , a modification of the diligence , which forty years ago still held its place on the Alpine roads. I stood at the door of the inn, observing the company who were to be my fellow-passengers. There were two or three from the outside world, like myself, a few mountaineers with suggestions of the Tyrol in their garb, and one figure in a high degree picturesque, a Franciscan friar in guise as mediaeval as possible. His coarse, brown robe wrapped him from head to foot. A knotted cord bound his waist, the ends depending toward the pavement and swinging with his rosary. His feet were shod with sandals, and his head was bare, though an ample cowl was at hand to shelter it. His head needed no tonsure for age had made him nearly bald. His shaven face was kind and strong and he was in genial touch with the by-standers, to whom no doubt such a figure was not novel. Incongruously enough, the friar held over his head in the pouring rain a modern umbrella, his only concession to the storm and to modernity. Presently we climbed in for the journey, and I was a trifle taken aback when the monk by chance followed me directly, and as we settled into our seats was my close vis-à-vis . As we bumped along the rough road our legs became dove-tailed together, I as well as he wrapped in the coarse folds of his monkish robe, the rosary as convenient to my hand as to his, and as the vehicle swayed our heads dodged each other as we rocked back and forth. Thrown thus, as it were into the embrace of the past, I made the most of it and got as far as might be into the mediaeval. I found my friar charmingly companionable. His Bavarian patois was not easy to follow, nor could he catch readily the speech I had been learning in the schools. But we made shift and had much talk as we drove through the storm into the highlands. He was a brother in the monastery at Salzburg, but being out of health, was making his way to a hospice of his order above the valley. He had heard of America, and knew there were houses of his order in that strange land. He was doubtful of its location, and possibly an American was a creature with whom he had never till then been in touch. Under the scrutiny of his mild eyes I was being studied as a queer outlandish specimen, as he certainly was to me. We parted at last as good friends, his head now enveloped in the cowl, his sandals pattering off in the dusk toward the little cell that awaited him in the hospice, while I sought a place by the fire in the inn of Berchtesgaden. I learned afterward that he was well known and much venerated in Salzburg.
I came into the mountain-nook oddly companioned, and my exit thence was equally so, though greatly in contrast. For a day or two I was storm-bound, and felt the depression natural in a remote solitude, wrapped in by rain and fog, with no society but an unintelligible mountaineer or two. At last it cleared and the revulsion was inspiring. I found myself in a little green vale hemmed in by magnificent heights whose rocky summits were covered with freshly-fallen snow. Close at hand rose the Watzmann, a soaring pyramid whose summit was cleft into two sharp peaks inclined into some semblance of a bishop's mitre. My recent association with the monk had made vivid the thought of the old church, and it seemed fitting that there should be lifted high in air such a symbol of the domination under which the region lay. But my Protestant eyes regarded it cheerfully, glad to have within range an object so picturesque. I forthwith strapped on my knapsack, buckled my belt, and strode out for the Königs-See, which lay not far beyond. I walked briskly for a mile or two, stimulated by the abounding oxygen of the highland air, but presently found myself where the road forked and there was nothing to indicate which was my right path. The solitude seemed complete, but as I stood hesitating, I was relieved by the appearance of a pedestrian who emerged from a by-way. As I framed an inquiry I was deterred by a certain augustness in the stranger. I had rarely seen a man of finer bearing. His stature was commanding, his figure, even in the rough, loose walking-dress he wore, was full of symmetry. His elastic step showed vigour, and his face under his broad-brimmed Tyrolese hat had much manly beauty. Was he perhaps a prince in disguise? His friendly salutation, given in deep masculine tones with a good-natured smile, put me at ease as I told him my strait. He said in good German, which I was glad once more to hear after my experience of the mountain patois , that he was on the way to the Königs-See, that he knew the road, and we would walk on together. I accommodated myself to his stride and we settled into a pace which carried us rapidly toward our goal, meanwhile talking cheerfully. I had found it usually a good passport to say I was an American and I withheld nothing as to my antecedents and my present errand in Germany. He was more reticent. He lived in Prussia and was at the moment taking an outing. His affability did not go the length of revealing his true character. If he were a high personage incognito , I was not to know it.
We reached at last the shore of the Königs-See, a blue, deep lake at a high elevation, encircled by lofty peaks, splintered, storm-beaten, and capped by snow which never melts, far above the range of grass and trees. A group of women on the beach had ready two or three broad and rudely-built boats, and noisily clamoured for our patronage. We chose what seemed the best, and the women rowers with stout arms soon propelled us far from shore into the midst of the Alpine sublimity. A silence fell, broken only by the oar-beats. Then, where the precipices rose highest we paused. Suddenly a gun was fired. It broke upon the silence startlingly loud, and after an interval the report reverberated in a series of crashes from height after height, dying down into a dull murmur from the steep most distant. I was awed by the sight and the sound, and awed too, by my companion. He had thrown off his hat and knapsack and stood with his fine stature at the bow. His classic face was turned upward to the peaks, and with a look as if he felt their power. He waved his arms toward them as if in a salutation to things sentient. The man seemed to befit the environment, majestic though it was.
We returned sooner than we desired from our excursion on the water, the boat-women being over eager for new passengers. My companion resumed his knapsack and it was time to part. To his question as to my plan I replied that I was there simply for the scenery, that I purposed to make my way back to Salzburg on foot by the paths that promised most, and should be guided by whatever I might learn. He said that he, too, was bound for Salzburg, walking for pleasure; and when I thereupon suggested that we might go on together, he readily fell in, and we trudged forward. Comradeship grew strong as the day passed, then a night in an unfrequented inn, then another day. We discussed things near and far, ancient and recent, I talking most but he was always genial and quietly responsive, and my confidence was invited. I told him of the little fresh-water college in the West with which I was associated, my functions being partly pedagogic and partly pastoral, of the embarrassments of co-education as we found them, the difficulty in the uplift of too frivolous youth to a high moral and spiritual plane, the embarrassment in curbing characters too reckless into decorum and propriety. He listened sympathetically, with no discoverable cynicism in the rather grave smile he usually wore. As to whom he might be, he remained constantly reticent, though my curiosity increased as the hours flew. We passed not far from two or three mountain resorts, where tourists were gathered. Near such my companion showed some nervousness. There might be people there who knew him, and it suited him for the time to remain by himself. This I took as some small confirmation of my suspicion that he was a great personage. Physically certainly he was superbly endowed. The roads were rough and often steep, and I found the tramp fatiguing; but when I asked if he, too, were not tired, he laughed at the idea, tossing his burden or taking an extra climb as fresh as at the start. At night our cots were in the same room. As he stripped off his shirt and stood with head pillared upon a most stately neck, and massive, well-moulded chest and shoulders, he was statuesque indeed.
At last Salzburg came in sight. Though we had become quite intimate I had made no progress in penetrating to my comrade's true character. I had laid many an innocent little trap to induce him to speak more openly, but no slip on his part ever betrayed him. We entered the city and sat down together at a table in a public garden, near the castle of the old Bishops of Salzburg, ordering for each a glass of light wine, the parting-cup. Already, since our entrance into the city things had occurred which partly confirmed the theory I had formed as to the distinction of my comrade, and also aroused in my mind doubts not quite comfortable. He was an object of interest in the well-dressed crowd. That he was a conspicuously handsome man in a measure explained that, but there were signs, too, that some recognised him as a person well-known. When we were seated in the garden actual acquaintances began to appear, agile athletic young men, who were deferential but familiar. There were ladies, too, modest enough, but certainly unconventional, nimble free-footed beings, with feathers and ribbons streaming airily as they flitted. These, like the men, were deferential to my comrade, yet familiar. There seemed to be a renewing of some old tie that all were glad to reconnect. The young men were actively demonstrative, the ladies wove in and out smilingly, and my comrade in the midst beamed and grew voluble. Was it an environment into which a quiet American college functionary could properly fit? No due bounds were transgressed, but the atmosphere was certainly very Bohemian. My prince incognito , was he perhaps the Prince of Pilsen? While this happy mingling was going forward I sat somewhat aloof, disconcerted that my cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces were thus crumbling into comic opera. But now my comrade approached me, aglow with social excitement, and, with a franker look in his eyes than he had before shown, addressed me: "Mein lieber Herr Professor, we have had a good ramble together and talked about many things. You have been confidential with me, and hoped that I would be with you. I have preferred to hold back, but now as we part I ought to tell you who I am. I am the prémier danseur in the ballet of the Royal Opera House in Berlin. Worn with the heavy work in Fantasca , which we produced elaborately and which ran long, I came down here when the season closed, for change and rest, and so fell in with you. These young Herren and Damen are the coryphés and figurantes , who in Berlin or in other cities have taken part with me in productions. Good people they are and unsurpassed as a corps de ballet ." We touched glasses, shook hands, and I went my way leaving Comus with his rout, guileless, I hope, as Milton's innocent "Lady," but such scales never fell from her starry eyes as fell from mine. I knew well about Fantasca . During my last weeks in Berlin it had been much talked about, a splendid theatrical spectacle put on with consummate art, and lavish expenditure. I had not seen it. Heredity from eight Puritan generations reinforced by impecuniosity had kept me from that. But I had heard of the wonderful visions of beauty and grace. My handsome comrade of the Bavarian Alps had been at the centre of it all, the god Apollo, or whatever glittering divinity or genius it was that swayed the enchantments and led in the rhythmic circlings. Good cause indeed I had had to admire his physical beauty. He had been picked out for that no doubt among thousands, then painfully trained for years until in figure and frame he was a model.
The gay pleasure garden in which we had parted lay close to a gloomy monastic structure, centuries old, that from a height dominated the little town. The garden and the structure were symbols of what was most salient in that country—the ancient church braced against progress, with its power broken in no way, and on the other hand of a life interpenetrated with things graceful and refined, with art, music, and poetry, but seamed, too, with frivolity and what makes for the pleasures of sense. My two friends also were in their way types,—the cowled Franciscan, aloof in a mediaeval seclusion though he breathed nineteenth-century air, and the dancer whom I encountered in the vale, above which the Watzmann upholds forever its solemn mitre. But they were good fellows both, my comrade in and my comrade out. The monk's heart was not too shrivelled to flow with human kindness, and the dancer had not unlearned in the glare of the foot-lights the graces of a gentleman.
I profess to be a man of peace. Through training, environment, and calling I ought to be so, and yet there is a fibre in any make-up which has always throbbed strangely to the drum. Is it perhaps a streak of heredity? In almost every noteworthy war since the foundation of the country, men of my line have borne a part. I count ancestors who stood among the minute-men at Concord bridge. Another was in the redoubt at Bunker Hill. In the earlier time two great-great-grandfathers went out against Montcalm and were good soldiers in the Old French War. Still earlier a progenitor, whose name I bear, faced the Indian peril in King Philip's War, and was among the slain in the gloomy Sudbury fight Perhaps it is a trace from these ancient forbears still lingering in my blood that will respond when the trumpets blow, however I strive to repress it, and it has given me qualms.
I was not easy in mind when I stood on the tower of St. Stephen's Church, in Vienna more than forty years ago, to find that what I sought most eagerly in the superb landscape was not the steep Kahlenberg, not the plumy woods of Schönbrunn, not the Danube pouring grandly eastward, nor the picturesque city at my feet; but the little hamlets just outside the suburbs, and the wide-stretching grain-field close by, turning yellow under the July sun, where Napoleon fought the battles of Aspern and Wagram. Nor was I quite easy when I set out to climb the St. Gotthard Pass, to find that although the valley below Airolo was so green with fertile pasture, and from the glaciers above me the heavens were pricked so boldly by the splintered peaks, I was thinking most where it was precisely that old Suwarrow dug the grave and threatened to bury himself, when his army refused to follow him; then how he must have looked when he had subdued them, riding forward in his sheepskin, or whatever rude Russian dress he wore, this uncouth hero who needed no scratching to be proved Tartar, while his loving host pressed after him into every death-yielding terror that man or nature could throw across his path.
That I had good reason for my uneasiness, on second thoughts, I do not believe. Nor do I believe it is just for you, high-toned friend, to censure me as somewhat low and brutal, when I confess that of all one can see in Europe, nothing thrilled me quite so much as the great historic battle-fields. Nothing deserves so to interest man as man himself; and what spots, after all, are so closely and nobly connected with man as the spots where he has fought? That we are what we are, indeed that we are at all,—that any race is what it is or is at all,—was settled on certain great fields of decision to which we as well as every race can point back. And then nothing absorbs us like a spectacle of pain and pathos! Tragedy enchants, while it shocks. The field of battle is tragedy the most shocking; is it doing indignity to our puzzling nature to say it is tragedy most absorbing? And there is another side. Once at midnight, in the light of our bivouac-fire, our captain told us in low tones that next day we were to go into battle. He was a rude fellow, but the word or two he spoke to us was about duty. And I well remember what the men said, as we looked by the fire-light to see if the rifles were in order. They would go into fire because duty said, "Save the country!" and when, soon after, the steeply-sloping angle of the enemy's works came into view, ominously red in the morning light, and crowned with smoke and fire, while the air hummed about our ears as if swarming with angry bees, and this one and that one fell, there was scarcely one who, as he pulled his cap close down and pushed ahead in the skirmish-line, was not thinking of duty. They were boys from farm and factory, not greatly better, to say the most, than their fellows anywhere; and we may be sure that thought of duty has always much to do with the going forward of weaponed men amongst the weapons. Men do fight, no doubt, from mere recklessness, from hope of plunder or glory; and sometimes they have been scourged to it. But more often, where one in four or five is likely to fall, the nobler motive is uppermost with men and felt with burning earnestness too, which only the breath of the near-at-hand death can fan up. No! there is reason enough why battle-fields should be, as they are, places of pilgrimage. The remoteness of the struggle hardly diminishes the interest with which we visit the scene; Marathon is as sacred as if the Greeks conquered there last year. Nor, on the other hand, do we need poetic haze from a century or two of intervening time: Gettysburg was a consecrated spot to all the world before its dead were buried. There need be no charm of nature; there are tracts of mere sand in dreary Brandenburg, where old Frederick, with Prussia in his hand, supple and tough as if plaited into a nation out of whip-cord, scourged the world; and these tracts are precious. On the other hand, the grandest natural features seem almost dwarfed and paltry beside this overmastering interest. On the top of the Grimsel Pass there is a melancholy, lonely lake which touches the spirit as much as the Rhone glacier close by, or the soaring Finster-Aarhorn, the Todten See (Sea of the Dead), beneath whose waters are buried soldiers who fell in battle there on the Alpine crags. Had I defined all this, I need not have felt uneasy on St. Stephen's spire or the St. Gotthard. We are not necessarily brutal if our feet turn with especial willingness toward battle-fields. There man is most in earnest; his sense of duty perhaps at its best; the sacrifice greatest, for it is life. Theirs are the most momentous decisions for weal or woe; theirs the tragedy beyond all other tremendous and solemn. It is right that the sacrifice they have witnessed should possess an alchemy to make their acres golden.
The humane, and I hope I may be counted among the number, have long wished that some milder arbitrament than that of arms might intervene to settle the disagreements of men. No such arbitrament has as yet come into being. We settle our disputes in this way, and history must record the struggles, however reluctantly. As an historical writer, it has been my function to deal with times of conflict in various periods and lands. When I was seventy years old I began writing a history of our Civil War. To have at hand the literature of the period I went to Washington, where the most kind officials of the Library of Congress assigned to me a roomy alcove in the north curtain with a desk and ample surrounding shelves. These were filled for me by expert hands with whatever I might require for my task, and a screen shut off my corner from the corridor through which at times perambulated Roosevelt, and other secluded delvers, intent on early Gaelic literature and what not. Here I spent the most of two years, finding it an ideal spot, but my task required more than an examination, under the quiet light of my great window, of books and documents. The fields themselves must also be surveyed, so I travelled far until I had visited the scene of nearly every important conflict and traced the lines of march in the great campaigns. I was already a haunter of old battle-fields, that thread of heredity, from a line of forbears very martial in their humble way, asserting itself in whatever lands I wandered. I had been at Hastings, and had traced the Ironsides to Marston Moor and Naseby. I had stood by the Schweden-Stein at Lützen, and tramped the sod of Leipsic and Waterloo. It was for me now to see our own fields of decision, fields ennobled by a courage as great and a purpose as high as soldiers have ever shown.
To mark Waterloo the Belgians reared a mound of huge dimensions, scraping the terrain far and near to obtain the earth. Wellington is said to have remarked that the features of the ground had been so far obliterated by this that he could not recognise his own positions. One wonders whether the future may not blame our generation for transformations almost as disguising. Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Vicksburg, and Shiloh are now elaborate parks. No mounds have been reared, but the old roads are smooth boulevards, trim lawns are on the ragged heights, the landscape-gardener has barbered the grim rough face of the country-side into something very handsome no doubt, but the imagination must be set to work to call back the arena as it was on the battle-day. From various points of vantage memorials make appeal, statues, obelisks, Greek temples, and porches, bewildering in their number, and now and then making doubtful claims. "This general," some scrutiniser will tell you, "never held the line ascribed to him and that pompous pile falsely does honour to troops who really wavered in the crisis." I know I run counter to prevailing sentiment in saying that I prefer a field unchanged, not with features blurred by an overlaying of ornamental and commemorative accretions. A few markers of the simplest, and a plain tablet now and then where a hero fell or valour was unusually conspicuous, should suffice, for a field is more impressive that lies for the most part in its original rudeness and solitude. At Antietam I found little obtrusive. Sherman's fields on the way to and about Atlanta have not been marred; nor at Franklin and Nashville are the plains parked and obelisked out of recognition. At Bull Run I climbed with a veteran of the signal-service into the top of a high tree, an old war-time station, on the hill near the Henry House. The precarious platform remained. From such an eyrie in the same grove, perhaps from this same tree, a Southern friend of mine, on the battle-day, caught sight more than two leagues away of the glint of sunlight on cannon and bayonets toward Sudley Springs, and sent timely notice to Beauregard that a Federal column was turning his left. Under my eye the landscape was unchanged, with no smoothings or intrusions to embarrass the imagination in making the scene real. But it was in the Wilderness that I felt especially grateful that the wild thickets for the most part had been let alone. I found at Fredericksburg an old Confederate, one of Mahone's command, and hiring an excellent roadster, we drove on a perfect autumn day first to Spottsylvania Court House, then across country to the Brock road, then home by the Wilderness church and Chancellorsville. On the area we traversed were fought four of our most memorable battles, an area now scarcely less tangled and lonely than when the Federals poured across the Rappahannock into its thickets by the thousand, and were so memorably met. My veteran knew the pikes and the by-paths, and we fraternised with the warmth usual among foemen who at last have become friends. He knew the story well of every wood-path and cross-roads. Certainly I was glad that the rugged acres had undergone no "improvement," and that the eye fell so nearly on what the old-time soldiers saw. It so happened it was election-day. There were polling-places at the court-houses of Fredericksburg and Spottsylvania, at Todd's Tavern, and the Chancellor house, names bearing solemn associations. The neighbourhoods had come out to vote, and introduced by my comrade, I had some interesting encounters. It was a good climax, when toward the end, near the Chancellor House, we met in the road a patriarchal figure, whitebearded and sturdy, on his way home from the polls. It was old Talley, whose log-house, in 1862, was the point from which Stonewall Jackson began his sudden rush upon Hooker's right. Talley, then a young farmer, had walked at the General's stirrup pointing out the way. He had interesting things to tell of Stonewall Jackson at that moment when his career culminated. "What did he seem like?" I queried. "He was as cool and business-like as an old farmer looking after his fences." On an old battle-field which had been illustrated by an achievement of the Stonewall division especially brilliant, I chanced to meet a grey veteran who had taken part in it, a North Carolinian who had come back to review the scene. We fraternised, of course. "What did Stonewall Jackson look like?" I said. Stepping close to me, the "Tarheel" extended his two gnarled forefingers, and pressed between the tips my cheek-bones on either side. "He had the broadest face across here I ever saw," he said. Such a physiognomical trait is perhaps indicative of power of brain and will, but I do not recall it among the usual descriptions of Jackson.
Naturally, after surveying much Virginia country once war-swept, as I came to the head of the Shenandoah Valley, I could not miss a visit to Lexington, where repose in honoured graves two such protagonists as Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It is a beautiful town among low mountains green to the summit, and in the streets not a few lovely homes of the Virginia colonial type, draped with ivy and wisteria. There stand the buildings of Washington and Lee University, in the chapel of which lies buried Robert E. Lee, and a short mile beyond is the Virginia Military Institute, from which Stonewall Jackson went forth to his fame. The memorial at Jackson's grave is appropriate, a figure in bronze, rugged as he was in face and attire, the image of him as he fought and fell. Different, but more impressive is the memorial of Lee. You enter through the chapel where the students gather daily, then passing the chancel, stand in a mausoleum, where nobly conceived in marble the soldier lies as if asleep. He bears his symbols as champion in chief of the "Lost Cause," but the light on his face is not that of battle. It is serene, benignant, at peace. I was deeply moved as I stood before it, but soon after I was to experience a deeper thrill. The afternoon was waning when I walked on to the Military Institute. Stonewall Jackson had been for ten years a teacher there. The turf of the parade I was crossing had perhaps felt no footfall more often than his. Two or three hundred pupils, the flower of Virginia youth, were assembled in battalion, and I witnessed from a favourable point their almost perfect drill. As the sun was about to set, they formed in a far-extending line, with each piece at present. They were saluting the flag, which now began slowly to descend from, its staff. Lo, it was the flag of the Union. The band played, I thought, with unusual sweetness, the Star-Spangled Banner, and to the music those picked youths of the South, sons and grandsons of the upholders of the right to sever, did all possible honour, on the sod which Stonewall Jackson trod, hard by the grave of Lee, to the symbol of a country united, states now and hereafter in a brotherhood not to be broken! It was a scene to evoke tears of deep emotion, for never before or since has it come home to me so powerfully that the Union had been preserved.
Closing as I do now my record of memories, I feel that the most momentous of the crises through which it has been my lot to pass is that attending the maintenance of the Federal bond in the United States. Assemblies of veterans of the Confederacy and those who address them scout the idea that they fought to preserve negro bondage. A late historian of our Civil War, Professor Paxon, of Wisconsin, holds it to be "reasonably certain" that in another generation slavery would have disappeared of itself, a contention surely open to dispute. Here I neither dispute nor approve, but only say, if the claim can be made good, what a vindication would it constitute of men, who looked for the quiet dying out of an inveterate evil, deprecating passionate attack upon a thing moribund? And what an indictment of the John Browns, whose impatient consciences pressed for instant abolition careless of whatever cataclysm it might involve! Certainly the two prime champions whose graves I saw at Lexington did not fight to sustain slavery. Their principle was that a State could not be coerced,—and that therefore sovereignty lay in the scattered constituents and not at the centre. The arbitrament of the sword was sharp and swift, and happily for the world it went against them. I well recall the map of Germany I studied when a boy, a page blotched and seamed with bewildering spots of colour. The effort was to portray the position of some three hundred independent political units, duchies, principalities, bishoprics, free cities, and what not, among electorates and kingdoms of a larger sort, but still minute. It seemed like a pathological chart presenting a face broken out with an unseemly tetter. The land indeed, in those days, was afflicted by a sad political disease. The Germans call it " Particularismus " or " Vielstaaterei ," the breaking up of a nationality into a mass of fragments. Some on the map were scarcely larger than pinheads, and in actual area hardly exceeded a fair-sized farm. In that time Heine laughed at one of them after this fashion, while describing a journey over it in bad weather:
"Of Bückeburg's principality
Full half on my boots I carried.
Such muddy roads I've never beheld
Since here in the world I've tarried."
The consequences of this disintegration were disastrous to the dignity of Germany and the character of her people. She had no place among the real powers of the world politically, and her masses, lacking the stimulus of a noble national atmosphere, were dwarfed and shrivelled into narrow and timid provincialism, split as they were into their little segregations. Patriotism languished in dot-like States oppressively administered, without associations to awaken pride, or generous interests to evoke devotion. Spirits like Leasing and Goethe, all but derided patriotism. It scarcely held a place among the proper virtues. The small units were forever unsympathetic and inharmonious, jealous over a petty "balance of power" and always liable to war. The disease which the face of the map suggested to the boy's imagination was indeed a real one, inveterate, deep-seated, and prostrating to all that is best in human nature. For a few years, before the adoption of the Constitution, America seemed likely to fall a prey to it, each of the thirteen States standing aloof on its own little dignity in a bond scarcely more than nominal, of the weakest and coolest. In 1787 came the beneficent change. The thirteen and those that followed the thirteen were made one, and it was the beginning of a grand unifying in many lands. Following an instinct at first only faintly manifest but which soon gathered strength, disintegrated Germany became one. Italy, too, became one, and in our old home the "Little Englanders," once a noteworthy company, succumbed to a conquering sentiment that England should become a "great world-Venice," and the seas no longer barriers, but the highways, through which the parent-state and her brood of dominions, though flung far into many zones, should yet go easily to and fro, not separate nations, nor yet a company bound together by a mere rope of sand, but one. Great nations replaced little states.
Had the South prevailed in the Civil War, there would have been a distinct and calamitous set-back in the world movement. It would have been a reaction toward particularism, and how far might it not have gone? Into what granulations might not our society have crumbled? The South's principle once recognised, there could have been no valid or lasting tie between States. Counties even might have assumed to nullify, and towns to stand apart sufficient unto themselves. When the thing was doubtful with us, the North by no means escaped the infection. The New York City of Fernando Wood contemplated isolation not only from the Union but from the State of which it was a part. Had the spirit then so rife really prevailed, the map of America to-day might have been no less blotched with the morbid tetter of particularism than that of the Germany of sixty years ago. Centralisation may no doubt go too far, but in the other extreme may lie the gravest danger, and rushing thitherward the South was blind to the risk. I stood with all reverence by the graves of the two great men at Lexington. Perhaps no Americans have been in their way more able, forceful, and really high-purposed. But they were misguided, and their perverted swords all but brought to pass for us and the future the profoundest calamity. I am proud to have been in the generation that fought them down, believing that upholding the country was doing a service to the world. I think of that lofty sentence inscribed upon the memorial of Goldwin Smith at Ithaca, "Above all nations is Humanity." Patriotism is not the highest of virtues. It is indeed a vice if it limits the sympathies to a part. Love for the whole is the sovereign virtue, and the patriotism is unworthy which is not subordinate to this, recognising that its only fitting work is to lead up to a love which embraces all.
And now I toss the "Last Leaf" on my probably over-large accumulation of printed pages. What I have set down is in no way an autobiography. It is simply the presentment of the panorama of nearly fourscore momentous years as unrolled before one pair of eyes. Whether the eyes have served their owner well or ill the gentle reader will judge. I hope I have not obtruded myself unduly, and that I may be pardoned as I close, if I am for a moment personal. My eyes have given me notice that they have done work enough and I do not blame them for insisting upon rest. As to organs in general I have scarcely known that I had any. They have maintained such peace among themselves, and been so quiet and deferential as they have performed their functions that I have taken no note of them, having rarely experienced serious illness. Had Aesop possessed my anatomy, he would have had small data for inditing his fable as to the discord between the "Members" and their commissariat, and the long generations might have lacked that famous incentive to harmony and co-operation. I venture to say this in explanation of my stubborn optimism, which is due much less to any tranquil philosophy I may have imbibed than to my inveterate eupepsia. My optimism has not decreased as I have grown old, and I record here as the last word, my faith that the world grows better. I recall with vividness nineteen Presidential campaigns, and believe that in no one has the outlook been so hopeful as now. Never have the leaders at the fore in all parties been more able and high-minded. I have purposed in this book to speak of the dead and not the living. Were it in place for me to speak of men who are still strivers, I could give good reason, derived from personal touch, for the faith I put in men whose names now resound. However the nation moves, strong and good hands will receive it, and it will survive and make its way. Agitation, the meeting of crises, the anxious application of expedients to threatening dangers,—these we are in the midst of, we always have been and always shall be. Turmoil is a condition of life, beneficently so, for through turmoil comes the education that leads man on and up. We encounter shocks that will seem seismic. But it will only be the settling of society to firmer bases of justice. In our confusions England is our fellow, but a better world is shaping there, though in the earthquake crash of old strata so much seems to totter. And farther east in France, Germany, and Russia are better things, and signs of still better. Levant and Orient rock with violence, but they are rocking to happier and humaner order. What greater miracle than the coming to the front among nations of Japan! Will her people perhaps distance their western teachers and models. Shall we reverse the poet's line to read "Better fifty years of China than a cycle of the West?" Society proceeds toward betterment, and not catastrophe, as individuals may proceed on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things. The troubles of the child, the broken toy, the slight from a friend, the failure of an expected holiday, are mole-hills to be sure, but in his circumscribed horizon they take an Alpine magnitude. His strength for climbing is in the gristle, nor has he philosophy to console him when blocked by the inevitable. When the child becomes a man his troubles are larger, but to surmount them he has an increment of spiritual vigour, which should swell with passing years. He lives in vain who fails to learn to bear and forbear serenely. For human society, and for the individuals that compose it, the happy time lies not behind but before, and I invite the gentle reader to accept with me the wise and kind thought of Rabbi Ben Ezra, now growing trite on the lips of men because we feel it to be true:
"Grow old along with me.
The best is yet to be,—
The last of life for which the first was made.
Our times are in His hand
Who saith a whole is planned.
Youth shows but half. Trust God; see all;
Nor be afraid."
Agassiz, Alexander, in college, 287; leads to the adoption
of crimson as the Harvard colour, 289; as captain of
industry, 289; as scientist, 290; as philanthropist, 293
Agassiz, Louis, in 1851, 283; as scientist and teacher, 284;
his strength and limitations, 287
Alcott, A. Bronson, at Concord, 249
Alcott, Louisa M., in young womanhood, 237; as writer for
children, 238
Andrew, John A., Governor of Massachusetts, 22; his
speech to the selectmen, 24
Antioch College, in the sixties, 67; dramatics at, 71
Bancroft, George, at Berlin, 162; his love for roses, 165;
at Washington, 166; as a historical path-breaker, 167
Banks, N.P., a pathetic figure, his rise and fall, 38
Barlow, Francis C., in college, 57; as a soldier, 61; after
the war, 65
Bartlett, W.P., as a soldier, 54
Battle-fields, as places of interest, 316
Berlin, in 1870, 110
Brooks, Phillips, as a youth, 255; in comic opera, 257; at
the Harvard Commemoration, 260; his breadth of
spirit, 261; at Lowell's funeral, 262
Bryce, James, his home in London, 194
Buffalo, in 1840, 1
Bunsen, the chemist, at Heidelberg, 266
Butler, B.F., at New Orleans, 41
Churchill, Lord Randolph, 198
Churchill, Winston, 200
Clark, James B., of Mississippi, 54
Concord, the town of, 233
Cox, Jacob D., 34
Curtius, Ernst, at Berlin, 206
Dancer, the, at the Königs-See, 310; at Salzburg, 313
Douglas, Stephen A., in his prime, 6; supports Lincoln in
1861, 8
Dramatics, at Antioch College, 71; in the schools of England, 80
in the schools of France, 76; in the schools of Germany, 72
Eliot, President C.W., as an oarsman, 223 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, in his prime, 246; his hospitality, 248; and Walt Whitman, 250; in old age, 253 Eupeptic musings, 332 Everett, Edward, his conservatism, 16; as an off-hand speaker, 17
Fillmore, Millard, as a friend, 2; signs the Fugitive Slave
Bill, 3; effects of the measure, 3; his home-life, 4;
with Lincoln at church, 5
Fiske, John, in youth, 168 and Mary Hemenway, 169; the
"Extension of Infancy," 170; his love for music, 174;
in social life, 175; at Petersham, 178
France, in war-time, 151
Francis Joseph, the Emperor, 141
Franciscan, the, at Salzburg, 307
Frederick, the Emperor, 139
Frederick the Great, his statue, 110; his sepulchre, 131
Freeman, Edward A., in America, 185; at Somerleaze, 186
Gardiner, Samuel R., in London, 181; at Bromley, 183
Garnett, Sir Richard, at the British Museum, 179
Germany, in 1870, 108
Gladstone, W.E., in 1886, 200
Goethe and Schiller, their graves, 129
Grant, U.S., his greatest conquest, 28
Gray, Asa, in the Botanic Garden, 278; in the class-room,
279; as a lecturer, 281; his services to science, 282
Grenadier, the young, of Potsdam, 144; of Weimar, 145
Grey, Mr. William, see Stamford.
Grimm, the brothers, their graves, 128
Grimm, Hermann, at Berlin, 212
Harrison, W.H., the campaign of 1840,1
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, at Concord, 239; at Brook Farm,
240; as a ghost-seer, 242; as literary artist, 243
Heidelberg, in 1870, 204
Helmholtz, the scientist, at Heidelberg, 268
Hohenzollern, the line of, 132
Hollis, 8; at Harvard, 161
Holmes, O.W., as an oarsman, 223; his versatility and
wit, 224; his deeper moods, 226
Home-life, in Germany in 1870, 124
Howard, O.O., at Gettysburg, 47
Kirchoff, the physicist, at Heidelberg, 265
Lepsius, the Egyptologist, 209
Lexington, Va., graves of R.E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson
at, 325
Lincoln, Abraham, at church, 5
Longfellow, H.W., in 1851, 218; the incubation of Hiawatha, 225;
memorial service for, 221
Lowell, Charles R., as a soldier, 55
Lowell, James Russell, in his prime, 227; his Yankee story,
227; his Commemoration Ode, 229; his funeral, 232
Ludwig, King of Bavaria, 143
Luther, Martin, his grave at Wittenberg, 130
Mann, Horace, as an inspirer, 67
Meade, George G., at the Harvard Commemoration, 29
Militarism, in Germany, 111
Mommsen, Theodor, at Berlin, 209
Munich, in 1870, 148
Museum, the Royal, at Berlin, 121
New Wrinkle at Sweetbrier, 71
Newcomb, Simon, as a youth, 271; his parentage, 272; as
an astronomer, 274; his last years, 276
Norman, Sir Henry, 197
Paris, in war-time, 152
Parliament, in 1886, 195
Pope, John, a pathetic figure, 42
Ranke, Leopold von, 207
Saxton, Rufus, at Port Royal, S.C., 48
Schenkel, Daniel, 211
Schools, in Russia, 116
Sedan, The
débâcle
at, 159
Seward, William H., his Plymouth oration, 13; his too
careless cigar, 14; the Alaska purchase, 15
Sheridan, Philip H., 28
Sherman, T.W., at Port Royal, S.C., 50
Sherman, W.T., in private life, 30; at dinner with, 31;
and John Fiske, 32; his funeral, 34
Slocum, Henry W., and Samuel J. May, 45
Smith, Goldwin, at Niagara, 191; his memorial stone at
Cornell, 192
Stamford, the Earl of, encountered on the Mississippi,
296; as a household guest, 301; a high-born
philanthropist, 304
Stevens, Isaac I., 52
Sumner, Charles, his fine presence, 18; as a youth, 19; a
conversation with, 21; and John A. Andrew, 24; his
strength and weakness, 26
Switzerland, in 1870, 150
Taft, W.H., in boyhood, 34
Thoreau, Henry D., in his early time, 235
"Tippecanoe and Tyler too," 2
Treitschke, von, at Heidelberg, 205
Uhlan, the young, of Erfurt, 145
Union, value of its triumph in the Civil War, 327
Universities, of Germany, in 1870, 119
Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia, 139
Webster, Daniel, his last speech in Faneuil Hall, 10; his
"big way," 11; his "Liberty and Union, now and
forever," 12
Weimar, the young grenadier of, 145
West Pointers and civilians in the Civil War, 33
Whitman, Walt, and Emerson, 250
Wilhelm der Grosse, Kaiser, 138
Wilhelm II., Kaiser, 139
Wilson, James H., 49
Winsor, Justin, as youth and man, 167
Winthrop, Robert C., his ability and conservatism, 17; as
master of the feast, 18
Wright, H.G., 57