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Judge Advocate General's Department Army of the United States CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS. eamo,$a.oo.

MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI. In the American Men of Letters Series. s6mo, $1.25.

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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. BOSTON AND NEW YORK. CHEERFUL

YESTERDAYS

BY

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON //

"A man he seems of cheerful yesterdays And confident to-morrows." WORDSWORTH, Excursion, Book VII. BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

~be i~i~.ier%ibe ~rep~, ~rambri~p MDCCC XCVIII /7/4 /~g COPYRIGHT, 1898,

BY THOMAS WRHTWORTH HIGGIMBOM ALL RIGHTS RRSSRYRD TO MY WIFE

MARY THACHER HIGGINSON

WHOSE SUNNY INFLUENCE ADDS APPROPRIATENESS TO THE

TITLE, ADOPTED AT HER SUGGESTION, OF THIS BOOK

OF REMINISCENCES

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., February 12, 1898 NOTE

The chapters of this book have appeared at short intervals in the "Atlantic Monthly" and are here reprinted with careful revision and with a few additions. Some of the latter are taken from a sketch of the author's mother, published originally in the "Ladies' Home Journal." These are here included by permission of the proprietors of that periodical. CONTENTS PAGE I. A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD I II. A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 38 III. THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS . 69 IV. THE REARING OF A REFORMER . 100 V. THE FUGITIVE SLAVE EPOCH 132 VI. THE BIRTH OF A LITERATURE 167 VII. KANSAS AND JOHN BROWN 196 VIII. CIVIL WAR 235 IX. LITERARY LONDON TWENTY YEARS AGO . 271 X. LITERARY PARIS TWENTY YEARS AGO . 298 XI. ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF PUBLIC LIFE . 326 EPILOGUE . . 362 INDEX . . . . . 365 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

I

A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD

IN introducing the imaginary Chronicles of P. p., Clerk of this Parish, the poet Pope re marks that any such book might well be in scribed, "On the Importance of a Man to Himself." Yet perhaps the first obstacle to be encountered by any autobiographer is the sud den sense of his own extreme unimportance. Does each ant in an ant-hill yearn to bequeath to the universe his personal reminiscences? When, at the dead of night, I hear my neigh bors at the Harvard Observatory roll away their lofty shutters, in preparation for their accustomed tryst with the stars, it seems as if one might well be content to keep silence in the presence of the Pleiades. Yet, after all, the telescope need only be reversed to make the universe appear little, and the observer large; so that we may as well begin at the one end as at the other. 2 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

"Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him."

Probably, if the truth were known, nothing in the universe is really insignificant, not even ourselves. When I think of the vast changes which every man of my time has seen, of the men and women whom I have known, - those who created American literature and who freed millions of slaves, - men and women whom, as the worldly-wise Lord Houghton once wrote me, "Europe has learned to honor, and would do well to imitate," then I feel that, whether I will or no, something worth chronicling may be included in the proposed chapters. For the rest, the autobiographer has the least reason of all writers to concern himself about the portrayal of his own personality. He is sure to reveal it, particularly if he tries to hide it. Confucius asked, "How can a man be concealed?" Of all methods, certainly not by writing his reminiscences. He can escape un observed, or else mislead observers, only by holding his tongue; let him open his lips, and we have him as he is. All the scenes and atmosphere of one's native village - if one is fortunate enough to have been born in such a locality - lie around the memory like the horizon line, unreachable, A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 3

impassable. Even a so-called cosmopolitan man has never seemed to me a very happy being, and a cosmopolitan child is above all things to be pitied. To be identified in early memories with some limited and therefore characteristic region, - that is happiness. No child is old enough to be a citizen of the world. What denationalized Americans hasten to stamp as provincial is for children, at least, a saving grace. You do not call a nest provincial. All this is particularly true of those marked out by temperament for a literary career. The pre destined painter or musician needs an early contact with the treasures and traditions of an older world, but literature needs for its material only men, nature, and books; and of these, the first two are everywhere, and the last are easily transportable, since you can pile the few su preme authors of the world in a little corner of the smallest log cabin. The Cambridge of my boyhood - two or three thousand people afforded me, it now seems, all that human heart could ask for its elementary training. Those who doubt it might, perchance, have been the gainers if they had shared it. "He despises me," said Ben Jonson, "because I live in an alley. Tell him his soul lives in an alley." I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 22, 1823, in a house built by my 4 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

father at the head of what was then called Professors' Row, and is now Kirkland Street, - the street down which the provincial troops marched to the battle of Bunker Hill, after halt ing for prayer at the "gambrel-roofed house" where Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes was born. My father's house - now occupied by Mrs. F. L. Batchelder - was begun in 1818, when the land was bought from Harvard College, whose official he had just become. Already the Scientific School and the Hemenway Gym nasium crowd upon it, and the university will doubtless, one of these days, engulf it once more. My father came of a line of Puritan clergymen, officials, militia officers, and latterly East India merchants, all dating back to the Rev. Francis Higginson, who landed at Salem in 1629, in charge of the first large party for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and who made that historic farewell recorded by Cotton Ma ther, as his native shores faded away: "We will not say, as the Separatists said, Farewell, Rome! Farewell, Babylon! But we will say, Farewell, dear England! Farewell, the Chris tian church in England, and all the Christian friends there!" My father had been, like his father before him, - also named Stephen Higginson, and a member of the Continental Congress in 1783, A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD S

- among the leading merchants of Boston, until Jefferson's embargo brought a great change in his fortunes. He had been unsur passed in those generous philanthropies which have given Boston merchants a permanent repu-. tation; he was, indeed, frequently mentioned - as his cousin, John Lowell, wrote of him as the Howard or the Man of Ross of his day. I still possess a fine oil painting of this last hero of Pope's lay, a picture sent anony mously to the house, during my father's life, with the inscription that it was for a man who "so eminently Copys the Fair Original." Through inquiries very lately made at Ross in England, I found with surprise that no picture of the original "Man of Ross" remained in the village; and I was led to suspect that this might be one of the two portraits which were once there, but have disappeared. Mine is certainly not that engraved in the "European Magazine" for 1786, but a far more attractive representation. My father retained warm friends in his adversity, who bought for him the land where the Cambridge house stood, and secured for him the position of steward of the college, the post now rechristened "bur sar," and one in which he did, as Dr. A. P. Peabody tells us, most of the duties of trea surer. In that capacity he planted, as I have 6 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

always been told, a large part of the trees in the college yard, - nobody in Cambridge ever says "campus," - and had also the wisdom to hang a lamp over each entrance to the yard, although these lamps were soon extinguished by the economical college. He was ardently interested in the early Unitarian division, then pending, in the Congregational body; organ ized the Harvard Divinity School, - not then, as now, undenominational; and seems to have been for some years a sort of lay bishop among the Unitarian parishes, distributing young min isters to vacant churches without fear or favor. He liked to read theology, but was in no respect a scholar; indeed, Dr. Peabody says that, on receiving for the institution its first supply of Hebrew Bibles, my father went to the president, Dr. Kirkland, with some indig nation, saying that the books must all be re turned, since tbe careless printer had put all the title-pages at the wrong end. In his adver sity as in his wealth, he was a man of bound less and somewhat impetuous kindness, and espoused with such ardor the cause of Miss Hannah Adams, the historian, against her rival in that profession, the Rev. Dr. Morse, that he was betrayed into a share in one or two vehe ment pamphlets, and very nearly into a law suit. A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 7

He died when I was nine years old, and my chief training came consequently from my mo ther and my aunt Miss Anne G. Storrow, then known to all the Cambridge world as "Aunt Nancy," who was to my mother like a second self in the rearing of her children. My mo ther's early life was like a chapter in a romance. Captain Thomas Storrow, an English officer, being detained a prisoner in Portsmouth dur ing that war, fell in love with a Portsmouth maiden, who adventurously married him at the age of seventeen, in 1777, and sailed with him to England. These were my mother's parents. The marriage had all the requisite elements of romance - youth, inexperience, two warring naticins, and two deeply dissatisfied families. The bride, Anne Appleton, represented two of the best families in the then somewhat aristo cratic province of New Hampshire, the Apple tons and the Wentworths; the latter, in par ticular, holding their heads so high that they were declared by a wicked Portsmouth wit to speak habitually of Queen Elizabeth as "Cousin Betsy Tudor." This was the nest in which my grandmother had been reared. She had lived from childhood in the house of her grandfather, Judge Wentworth; her great-grandfather was the first of the three royal governors of that name, and the two others were her near kins 8 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

men. She might, indeed, have sat for the heroine of Whittier's ballad, "Amy Went worth;" but it was a soldier, not a sailor, whom she married; and when she went to England fortunately under the proper escort of a kins woman - she was apparently received, both by her husband's relatives and her own, with all the warmth that might have been expected that is, with none at all. Yet she had sweet and winning qualities which finally triumphed over all obstacles; and her married life, though full of vicissitudes, was, on the whole, happy. They dwelt in England, in Jamaica, in St. Andrews, in Campobello, then in Jamaica again, Captain Storrow having in the meantime re signed his commission, and having died at sea on his passage to Boston, in 1795. My mother, Louisa Storrow, had been born, meanwhile, at St. Andrews, in 1786. Among my mother's most vivid childish re collections was that of being led, a weeping child of nine, at the stately funeral of her father, who was buried in Boston with military and Masonic honors. After his death his young widow opened a private school in Hingham, Massachusetts, and through the influence of kind friends in Boston, had boarding pupils from that city, only twenty miles away, thus laying for my mother the foundation of some A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 9

life-long friendships. This school has been praised by Mr. Barnard, the historian of early American education, as one of the best of the dawning experiments toward the education of girls. Mrs. Storrow, however, died within a year and a half, and her little family were left orphans among strangers or very recent friends. Their chief benefactor was my father, into whose family my mother was adopted, assist ing in the care of his invalid wife and two little girls. Nothing could at the time have been less foreseen than the ultimate outcome of this arrangement. My mother was betrothed at fifteen or sixteen to a young man - Edward Cabot - who was lost at sea; a year or two later her benefactress, my father's first wife, died, and my mother remained in the house hold as an adopted daughter, ultimately becom ing, at the early age of nineteen, my father's second wife. My father was sixteen years older than my mother, and into all his various interests she was at once thrown as the young Lady Bounti ful of the household. She also had the care of two stepchildren, who all their lives thought of her as their mother. My father lived in the then fashionable region of Mt. Vernon Street, in all the habits of affluence; his hospitality was inconveniently unbounded, and the young CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

wife found herself presiding at large dinner parties and at the sumptuous evening enter tainments, then more in vogue than now. It was the recorded verdict of the Hon. George Cabot, the social monarch of that day in Bos ton, that "no one received company better than Mrs. Higginson," and those who knew the unfailing grace and sweetness of her later manner can well believe it. She had at this time in their freshness certain points of physi cal beauty which she retained unusually unim paired until her latest years - a noble forehead, clear blue-gray eyes, a rose-tinted complexion, soft brown hair, a pliant figure, with slender hands and feet. She had, in all, ten children of her own, of whom I was the youngest. But before my birth the whole scene had suddenly changed. My father's whole fortune went when Jeffer son's embargo came; his numerous vessels were captured or valueless. He retired into the country, living on a beautiful sheep-farm in Bolton, Massachusetts, placed at his disposal by a more fortunate friend, Mr. S. V. S. Wilder. There lies before me my mother's diary at this farm, which begins thus: "On Saturday, the 8th April, 1815, we left our home, endeared to us by a long and happy residence and by the society of many dear and kind friends, to make A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD JI

trial of new scenes, new cares, and new duties; but though by this change we make some sac rifices and have some painful regrets, we are still experiencing the same goodness and mercy which have hitherto crowned our lives with happiness." "I always awake," she adds, "calm and serene. My children occupy my mind and my heart, and fill it with affection and gratitude. They are healthy, innocent, and happy, and I enjoy every moment of their lives. Books are my recreation, and, next to my children, my greatest source of pleasure. I read Stewart's 'Philosophical Essays' and the 'Faerie Queene' of Spenser, usually in the evening, which is charmingly undisturbed. This exemption from visitors is delightful to me; it gives me time to think and to read, and I only hope that I shall improve all my advan tages." She was at this time in her thirtieth year, and in this sweet spirit laid down the ut most that the little New England capital could then afford of luxury and fashion. Another change came soon, when she and her flock were transferred, rather against her will, to Cambridge, and placed in an official position. My father's connection with the col lege, and the popular qualities of my mother and aunt, brought many guests to our house, including the most cultivated men in Boston as 12 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

well as Cambridge. My earliest documentary evidence of existence on this planet is a note to my father, in Edward Everett's exquisite hand writing, inquiring after the health of the "babe," and saying that Mrs. Everett was putting up some tamarinds to accompany the note. The precise object of the tamarinds I have never clearly understood, but it is pleasant to think that I was, at the age of seven months, assisted toward maturity by this benefaction from a man so eminent. Professor Andrews Norton and George Ticknor habitually gave their own writings; and I remember Dr. J. G. Palfrey's bringing to the house a new book, Hawthorne's "Twice-Told Tales," and reading aloud "A Rill from the Town Pump." Once, and once only, Washington Irving came there, while visiting a nephew who had married my cousin. Mar garet Fuller, a plain, precocious, overgrown girl, but already credited with unusual talents, used to visit my elder sister, and would sometimes sit on a footstool at my mother's feet, gazing up at her in admiration. A younger sister of Professor Longfellow was a frequent guest, and the young poet himself came, in the dawning of his yet undeveloped fame. My nurse was a certain Rowena Pratt, wife of Dexter Pratt, the "Village Blacksmith" of Longfellow; and it is my impression that she was married from A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD '3

our house. It is amusing to remember that Professor Longfellow once asked me, many years after, what his hero's name was. My special playmate, Charles Parsons, was a nephew of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was in those years studying in Europe; and in the elder Dr. Holmes's house Charles Par sons and I often "tumbled about in a library," - indeed, in the very same library where the Autocrat had himself performed the process he recommended. Under these circumstances it seems very natural that a child thus moulded should have drifted into a literary career. The period here described was one when children were taught to read very early, and this in all parts of our country. The celebrated General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, in South Carolina, was reported by his mother in '745 as "beginning to spell before he is two years old;" but he himself said, later, of this preco cious teaching that it was "sad stuff," and that "by haste to make him a clever fellow he had very nearly become a stupid one." My mother made a memorandum in regard to my elder sister, "She knows all her letters at three," and of me that at four I had already "read a good many books." I still preserve a penciled note from a little playmate, the daughter of a professor, saying, "I am glad '4 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

you are six years old. I shall be four in March." My own daughter could not have written that note when she was seven, and yet she learned to read and write at that age almost without conscious effort. I cannot see that my contemporaries either gained or lost anything by this precocious instruction; and perhaps, in the total development of a child's mind, the actual reading of books plays a much smaller part than we imagine. Probably the thing of most importance, even with books, as an expe rienced Boston teacher once said, is to have been "exposed to them," to have unconsciously received their flavor, as a pan of milk takes the flavor of surrounding viands. To have lain on the hearth-rug and heard one's mother read aloud is a liberal education. When I remem ber that my mother actually read to us in the evenings every one of the Waverley Novels, even down to "Castle Dangerous," I cannot but regard with pity the children of to-day who have no such privilege. My father, in his days of affluence, had bought a great many books in London, and had them bound under his own eye in the solid fashion of that day. Many of them were sold in his adversity, yet nearly a thousand volumes remained, chiefly of English literature and his tory of the eighteenth century; and most of A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD '5

these I read. There was a fine set of Dr. Johnson's works in a dozen volumes, with an early edition of Boswell; all of Hoole's Tasso and Ariosto; a charming little edition of the British essayists, with pretty woodcuts; Be wick's Birds and Quadrupeds; Raynal's Indies; the Anti-Jacobin; Plutarch's Lives; Dobson's Life of Petrarch; Marshall's and Bancroft's Lives of Washington; Miss Burney's and Miss Edgeworth's works; and "Sir Charles Grandi son." There were many volumes of sermons, which my mother was fond of reading, - she was, I think, the last person who habitually read them,- but which I naturally avoided. There were a good many pretty little Italian books, belonging to one of my elder sisters, and a stray volume of Goethe which had been used by another. In out-of-the-way closets I collected the disused classical textbooks of my elder brothers, and made a little library to be pre served against that magic period when I too should be a "collegian." To these were to be added many delightful volumes of the later Eng lish poets, Collins, Goldsmith, Byron, Camp bell, and others, given at different times to my aunt by George Ticknor. In some of them - as in Byron's "Giaour " - he had copied additional stanzas, more lately published; this was very fascinating, for it seemed like poetry CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

in the making. Later, the successive volumes of Jared Sparks's historical biographies - Wash ington, Franklin, Morris, Ledyard, and the "Library of American Biography "- were all the gift of their kindly author, who had often brought whole parcels of Washington's and Franklin's letters for my mother and aunt to look over. A set of Scott's novels was given to my elder brother by his life-long crony, John Holmes. Besides all this, the family belonged to a book club, - the first, I believe, of the now innumerable book clubs: of this my eld est brother was secretary, and I was permitted to keep, with pride and delight, the account of the books as they came and went. Add to this my mother's love of reading aloud, and it will be seen that there was more danger, for a child thus reared, of excess than of scarcity. Yet as a matter of fact I never had books enough, nor have I ever had to this day. Seeing the uniform respect with which my mother and aunt and elder sisters were treated by the most cultivated men around us, I cannot remember to have grown up with the slight est feeling that there was any distinction of sex in intellect. Why women did not go to college was a point which did not suggest itself; but one of my sisters studied German with Pro fessor Charles Follen, while another took les A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD '7

Sons in Latin and Italian from Professor Bachi and in geometry from Professor Benjamin Peirce. I forget where this especial sister studied English, but she wrote for me all the passages that were found worth applauding in my commencement oration. Yet it is a curious fact that I owe indirectly to a single remark made by my mother all the opening of my eyes to the intellectual disadvantages of her sex. There came to Cambridge a very accomplished stranger, Mrs. Rufus King, of Cincinnati, Ohio, - afterward Mrs. Peter, - who established her self there about i837, directing the college training of a younger brother, two sons, and two nephews. No woman in Cambridge was so highly educated; and once, as she was making some criticisms at our house upon the inequalities between the sexes, my mother ex claimed in her ardent way, "But only think, Mrs. King, what an education you have ob tained." "Yes," was the reply, "but how did I obtain it?" Then followed a tale almost as pathetic as that told in Mrs. Somerville's auto biography, of her own early struggles for know ledge. I cannot now recall what she said, but it sank into my heart, at the age of fifteen or thereabouts; and if I have ever done one thing to secure to women better justice in any direc tion, the first impulse came from that fortunate question and reply. CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

More important, however, than all this, to my enjoyment, at least, was the musical atmo sphere that pervaded the house. My young est sister was an excellent pianist, - one of the first in this region to play Beethoven. Among the many students who came to the house there were three who played the flute well, and they practiced trios with her accompa niment. One of them was John Dwight, after wards editor of the "Journal of Music," and long the leading musical critic of Boston; an other was Christopher Pearse Cranch, poet and artist; and the third was William Habersham from Savannah, who had a silver flute, of which I remember John Dwight's saying, when it first made its appearance, "It has a silver sound." When I read in later years the experiences of the music-loving boy in "Charles Auchester," it brought back vividly the happiness with which, when sent to bed at eight o'clock, I used to leave the door of my little bedroom ajar, in order that I might go to sleep to music. Greater still were the joy and triumph when Miss Helen Davis, who was the musical queen of our Cambridge world, came and filled the house with her magnificent voice, singing in the dramatic style then in vogue the highly senti mental songs that rent my childish heart with a touch of romance that happily has never faded A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD '9

away: "The Breaking Waves Dashed High," "The Outward Bound," "Love Not," "Fairy Bells," "The Evening Gun," and dozens of others, the slightest strain of which brings back to me, after sixty years, every thrill of her voice, every movement of her fine head. Strange power of music, strange gift to be bestowed on one who, when once away from the piano, was simply a hearty, good-natured woman, without a trace of inspiration! She was the sister of Lieu tenant (afterwards Admiral) Davis, and his fine naval achievements at Port Royal and Memphis seemed only to put into "squadron-strophes" the magnificent triumphs of her song. I still recall the enchantment with which I heard, one moonlit summer night, the fine old glee "To Greece we give our Shining Blades," sung as a serenade under my sister's window, by a quar tette consisting of Miss Davis and her brother, of Miss Harriet Mills, who afterwards became his wife, and of William Story. I had never before heard the song, and it made me feel, in Keats's phrase, as if I were going to a tour nament. I went to a woman's school till I was eight; then walked daily, for five years, from the age of eight to that of thirteen, to the private school of William Wells, an institution which was then regarded as being - with the possible 20 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

exception of the Boston Latin School - the best place in which to fit for Harvard Col lege, and which was therefore much sought by the best Boston families. Mr. Wells was an Englishman of the old stamp, erect, vigorous, manly, who abhorred a mean or cowardly boy as he did a false quantity. The school was a survival of a type which still lingers, I fancy, in the British provinces, - honest and genuine, mainly physical in its discipline, and somewhat brutal as to its boyish life and ways. Being a day-scholar only, I escaped something of the coarseness and actual demoralization which ex isted there; and thanks to an elder brother, the strongest boy in the school, I went free of the frequent pommeling visited by the larger boys on the smaller. I will not go so far as my schoolmate, the late Charles C. Perkins, who used simply to say of it, when questioned by his young sons, "My dears, it was hell ;" but even as a day-scholar I recall some aspects of it with hearty dislike, and am glad that it was my happy lot to have come no nearer. The evil was, however, tempered by a great deal of wholesome athletic activity, which Mr. Wells encouraged: there was perpetual playing of ball and of fascinating running games; and we were very likely to have an extra half-holi day when skating or coasting was good. A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 21

There was no real cruelty in the discipline of the school, - though I have sometimes seen this attributed to it, as in Adams's "Life of Richard Dana," - but Mr. Wells carried always a rattan in his hand, and it descended frequently on back and arm. Being very fond of study and learning easily, I usually escaped the rod; but I can see now that its very presence was some what degrading to boyish nature. Mr. Wells taught us absolutely nothing but Latin and Greek, yet these he inculcated most faithfully, and I have heretofore described, in an essay "On an Old Latin Text Book," the joy I took in them. I well remember that on first being promoted to translating English into Greek, I wrote on and on, purely for pleasure, doing the exercises for days in advance. I should add that he taught us to write from copies set by himself in a clear and beautiful handwriting, and that we were supposed to learn something of history by simply reading aloud in class from Russell's "Modern Europe;" this being, after all, not so bad a way. It must not be forgotten that he bestowed a positive boon upon us by producing a Latin grammar of his own, so brief and simple that when I was afterwards called upon to administer to pupils the terrible manual of Andrews and Stoddard, it seemed to me, as indeed it has always since seemed, a burden 22 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

too intolerable to be borne. French was taught by his eldest daughter, an excellent woman, though she sometimes had a way of tapping little boys on the head with her thimble; and mathematics we received from a succession of Harvard students, thimbleless. For a time, one fair girl, Mary Story - William Story's sis ter, and afterwards Mrs. George Ticknor Curtis - glided in to her desk in the corner, that she might recite Virgil with the older class. But in general the ill effect of a purely mas culine world was very manifest in the school, and my lifelong preference for co-education was largely based upon what I saw there. I could not help noticing - and indeed observed the same thing in another boarding - school, where I taught at a later day - the greater re finement, and I may say civilization, of the day scholars, who played with their sisters at home, as compared with those little exiles who had no such natural companionship. I must not for get one almost romantic aspect of the school in the occasional advent of Spanish boys, usually from Porto Rico, who were as good as dime novels to us, with their dark skins and sonorous names, - Victoriano Rosello, Magin Rigual, Pe dro ManguaL They swore superb Spanish oaths, which we naturally borrowed; and they once or twice drew knives upon one another, with A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 23

an air which the "Pirates' Own Book" offered nothing to surpass. Nor must I forget that there were also in the school certain traditions, superstitions, even mechanical contrivances, which were not known in the world outside. There were mechanisms of pulleys for keeping the desk-lid raised; the boys made for them selves little two-wheeled trucks to ride upon, and every seat in the school was perforated with two small holes for needles, to be worked by a pulley, for the sudden impaling of a fel low student, or even of the mathematical usher. Enormous myths existed as to what had been done, in the way of rebellion, by the pupils of a previous generation; and the initials of older students still remained carved in vast confusion on the end of the woodshed, like the wall which commemorates Canning and Byron at Harrow. Above all, a literature circulated under the desks, to be read surreptitiously, - such books as those to which Emerson records his grati tude at the Latin School; fortunately nothing pernicious, yet much that was exciting, includ ing little dingy volumes of "Baron Trenck," and "Rinaldo Rinaldini," and "The Three Spaniards," and "The Devil on Two Sticks." Can these be now found at any bookstore, I wonder, or have the boys of the present gen eration ever heard of them? 24 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

But the most important portion of a boy's life is perhaps his outdoor training, since to live out of doors is to be forever in some respects a boy. "Who could be before me, though the palace of the C~esars crackt and split with em perors, while I, sitting in silence on a cliff of Rhodes, watcht the sun as he swang his golden censer athwart the heavens?" Landor's hero was not happier than my playmate, Charles Parsons, and myself, as we lay under Lowell's willows "at the causey's end," after a day at Mount Auburn, - then Sweet Auburn still, to sort out our butterflies in summer or divide our walnuts in autumn, while we chanted uproar iously the "Hunter's Chorus: "We roam through the forest and over the mountain; No joy of the court or banquet like this."

We always made a pause after the word "court," and supposed ourselves to be hurling defiance at monarchies. Every boy of active tastes - and mine were eminently such - must become the one thing or the other, either a sportsman or a naturalist; and I have never regretted that it was my lot to become the latter. My fellow townsman, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, describes himself as wandering along our native stream "with reek ing sandal and superfluous gun." My sandals suffered, also, but I went with butterfly-net and A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 25

tin botanical box. Perhaps these preoccupied me before I yearned after field-sports, or per haps there was no real yearning. I can remem ber that as a child I sometimes accompanied an elder brother or cousin to pick up the birds he shot, though he rarely seemed to shoot any; but there occurred an event which, slight as it was, damped all longing to emulate him. Com ing down what is now Divinity Avenue with an older boy, George Ware, who rejoiced in a bow and arrow, we stopped under the mulberry-tree which still stands at the entrance of the street, and he aimed at a beautiful crested cedar-bird which was feeding on the mulberries. By some extraordinary chance he hit it, and down came the pretty creature, fluttering and struggling in the air, with the cruel arrow through its breast. I do not know whether the actual sportsman suffered pangs of remorse, but I know that I did, and feel them yet. After wards I read with full sympathy Bettine Bren tano's thoughts about the dead bird: "God gives him wings, and I shoot him down; that chimes not in tune." I later learned from Tho reau to study birds through an opera-glass. It may appear strange that with this feeling about birds I seemed to have no such vivid feeling about fishes or insects. Perhaps it was because they are so much farther from the 26 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

human, and touch the imagination less. I could then fish all day by the seashore and could collect insects without hesitation, - always be ing self-limited in the latter case to two speci mens of each species. Since the Civil War, how ever, I find that I can do neither of these things without compunction, and was pleased to hear from that eminent officer and thoroughly manly man, General Francis A. Walker, that the war had a similar effect on him. "Dulce bellum inexpertis." It has been a source of happiness for life to have acquired such early personal acquaintance with the numberless little people of the woods and mountains. Every spring they come out to meet me, each a familiar friend, unchanged in a world where all else changes; and several times in a year I dream by night of some realm gorgeous with gayly tinted beetles and lustrous butterflies. Wild flowers, also, have been a lasting delight, though these are a little less fascinating than insects, as belonging to a duller life. Yet I associate with each ravaged tract in my native town the place where vanished flowers once grew, - the cardinal flowers and gentians in the meadows, the gay rhexia by the woodside, and the tall hibiscus by the river. Being large and tolerably strong, I loved all kinds of athletic exercises, and learned to swim A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 27

in the river near where Professor Horsford's active imagination has established the "Lief's booths" of the Norse legends. There have been few moments in life which ever gave a sense of conquest and achievement so delicious as when I first clearly made my way through water beyond my depth, from one sedgy bank to another. Skating was learned on Craigie's Pond, now drained, and afterwards practiced on the beautiful black ice of Fresh Pond. We played baseball and football, and a modified cricket, and on Saturdays made our way to the tenpin alleys at Fresh Pond or Porter's Tavern. My father had an old white pony which pa tiently ambled under me, and I was occasionally allowed to borrow Dr. Webster's donkey, the only donkey I had ever seen. Sometimes we were taken to Nahant for a day by the seaside, and watched there the swallows actually building their nests in Swallows' Cave, whence they have long since vanished. Perhaps we drove down over the interminable beach, but we oftener went in the steamboat; and my very earliest definite recollection is that of being afraid to go down into the cabin for dinner because a black waiter - the first I ever saw - had just gone down, and I was afraid. Considering how deeply I was to cast in my lot with the black race in later years, it seems curious that the 28 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

acquaintance should have begun with this un substantial and misplaced alarm. Probably the fact was fixed firmly in memory by the result ing hunger. It was a great advantage for outdoor training that my school was a mile off, and I paced the distance to and fro, twice a day, through what was then a rural region interspersed with a few large houses of historical associations. The great colonial residences on Tory Row, of which Craigie House was only one, always impressed the imagination. Sometimes I had companions, - my elder brother for a time, and his class mates, Lowell and Story. I remember tread ing along close behind them once, as they dis cussed Spenser's "Faerie Queene," which they had been reading, and which led us younger boys to christen a favorite play-place "the Bower of Blisse." Story was then a conspicu ously handsome boy, with a rather high-bred look, and overflowing with fun and frolic, as indeed he was during his whole life. Lowell was at that time of much more ordinary ap pearance, short and freckled, and a secondary figure beside Story; yet in later life, with his fine eyes and Apollo - like brow, he became much the more noticeable of the two, as he was certainly far superior in genius. Oftener I went alone. Sometimes I made A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 29

up stories as I went, usually magnifying little incidents or observations of my own into some prolonged tale with a fine name, having an im aginary hero. For a long time his name was D'Arlon, from the person of that name in Taylor's "Philip van Artevelde," which my mother was reading to us. In these imagin ings all the small wrongs and failures of my life were retrieved. D'Arlon went through the same incidents with myself, but uniformly succeeded where I had failed, and came out of the crisis with the unerring certainty of one of Stanley Weyman's heroes. One of my chief playmates, Thornton Ware, a handsome boy with curly black hair, the admiration of all little girls, might easily distance me in their regard, but had no chance whatever against the imaginary D'Arlon. At other times I had no material for a story, but watched the robins, the bluebirds, and above all the insects, acquir ing an eagle eye for a far-off moth or beetle on fence or wall. I remember that at the corner where Craigie Street now turns off from Brattle Street, there was a clump of milkweed, where every day there was some new variety of spot ted ladybird (coccinella or chrysomela); and I remember pondering, as I compared them, with pre-Darwinian wonder, whether they were all created from the beginning as separate species, 30 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

or were somehow developed from one another. On other days I played a game of football a mile long, trying to kick before me some par ticular stone or horse-chestnut for the whole distance from the school door to my own gate; sometimes betting heavily with myself, and perhaps losing manfully, like Dick Swiv eller at his solitary cribbage. Then in winter there was always the hope of "punging," get ting a ride on the runners of a sleigh, or hitch ing my sled behind some vehicle; and in spring that of riding with the driver of an empty ice-cart or walking beside a full one, and watch ing the fine horses that then, in endless pro cession, drew heavy wagons bearing the winter harvest of Fresh Pond to be shipped to distant lands. My most immediate playmate was the next door neighbor, already mentioned, who in later life was a medical professor in Brown Univer sity. He was a prim, grave little boy, and was called "old-fashioned;" he was very preco cious, and though only three months older than myself was a year before me in college, graduat ing at just seventeen, - each of us being the youngest in our respective classes. There was between our houses only the field now occupied by the Hemenway Gymnasium and the Scien tific School; and while we were not school A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 3'

mates, we were almost constantly together out of school hours. Many an hour we spent por ing over the pictures in the large old Rees' Cy clopaAia; afterwards, when weary, piling up the big volumes for fortifications, to be mutually assailed by cannonading apples from a perpetual barrel in the closet. Meanwhile, the kindly old grandfather, working away at his sermons or his "American Annals," never seemed dis turbed by our romping; and I remember viv idly one winter evening, when he went to the window, and, scratching with his knife-blade through the thick frost, shaped the outlines of rough brambles below, and made a constella tion of stars above, with the added motto, "Per aspera ad astra," - then explaining to us its meaning, that through difficulties we must seek the stars. It is a mistake to suppose that we did not have, sixty years ago in New England, associa tions already historic. At home we had vari ous family portraits of ancestors in tie-wigs or powdered hair. We knew the very treasures which Dr. Holmes describes as gathered in his attic, and never were tired of exploring old cupboards and hunting up traditions. We de lighted to pore over the old flat tombstones in the Old Cambridge cemetery, stones with long Latin inscriptions, on which even the language 32 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

is dead, celebrating virtues ending in issimus and errimus. The most impressive of all was the Vassall monument, raised on pillars above the rest, and bearing no words, only the carved goblet and sun (Vas - sol), - the monument beneath which lie, according to tradition, the bodies of two slaves "At her feet and at her head Lies a slave to attend the dead, But their dust is white as hers."

This poem was not yet written, but Holmes's verses on this churchyard were familiar on our lips, and we sighed with him over his sister's grave, and over the stone where the French exile from Honfleur was buried and his epitaph was carved in French. Moreover, the "ever roaming girls" whom Holmes exhorted to bend over the wall and "sweep the simple lines" with the floating curls then fashionable, - these were our own neighbors and sweethearts, and it all seemed in the last degree poetic and charm ing. More suggestive than all these were the eloquent fissures in the flat stones where the leaden coats of arms had been pried out to be melted into bullets for the Continental army. And it all so linked us with the past that when, years after, I stood outside the Temple Church in London, and, looking casually down, saw be neath my feet the name of Oliver Goldsmith, A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 33

it really gave no more sense of a dignified his toric past than those stones at my birthplace. Nor did it actually carry me back so far in time. In the same way, our walks, when not di rected toward certain localities for rare flow ers or birds or insects, - as to Mount Auburn sands, now included in the cemetery of that name, or the extensive jungle north of Fresh Pond, where the herons of Longfellow's poem had their nests, - were more or less guided by historic obj ects. There was the pictur esque old Revolutionary Powder Mill in what is now Somerville, or the remains of redoubts on Winter Hill, where we used to lie along the grassy slopes and repel many British on slaughts. Often we went to the fascinating wharves of Boston, then twice as long as now, and full of sea-smells and crossed yards and earringed sailors. A neighbor's boy had the distinction of being bad enough to be actually sent to sea for a dubious reformation; and though, when he came back, I was forbidden to play with him, on the ground that he not only swore, but carried an alleged pistol, yet it was something to live on the same street with one so marked out from the list of common boys, and to watch him from afar exhibiting to youths of laxer training what seemed to be the 34 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

weapon. I may here add that the only other child with whom I was forbidden to play be came in later life an eminent clergyman. Once we undertook to go as far as Bunker Hill, and were ignominiously turned back by a party of Charlestown boys, - "Charlestown pigs," as they were then usually and affec tionately called, - who charged us with being "Port chucks" (that is, from Cambridgeport) or "Pointers" (that is, from Lechmere Point, or East Cambridge), and ended with the mild torture of taking away our canes. Or we would visit the ruins of the Ursuline Convent, whose flames I had seen from our front door in Cambridge, standing by my mother's side; all that I had read of persecutions not implanting so lasting a love of liberty as that one spectacle. I stood by her also the day after, when she went out to take the gauge of public opinion in consultation with the family butcher, Mr. Houghton; and I saw her checkmated by his leisurely retort, "Wal, I dunno, Mis' Higgin son; I guess them biships are pretty dissipated characters." The interest was enhanced by the fact that a youthful Cambridge neighbor, Maria Fay, was a pupil in the school at the time, and was held up by the terrified precep tress to say to the rioters, "My father is a judge, and if you don't go away he will put you A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 35

all in jaiL" The effect of the threat may have been somewhat impaired by the fact that her parent was but a peaceful judge of probate, and could only have wreaked his vengeance on their last wills and testaments. At any rate, there stood the blackened walls for many years, until the bricks were used in building the inside walls of the cathedral towers in Boston; and there was no other trace of the affray, except the inscription "Hell to the Pope," scrawled in charcoal on a bit of lingering plaster. We gazed at it with awe, as if it were a memorial of Bloody Mary - with a difference. Greatly to my bliss, I escaped almost abso lutely all those rigors of the old New England theology which have darkened the lives of so many. I never heard of the Five Points of Calvinism until maturity; never was converted, never experienced religion. We were expected to read the New Testament, but there was nothing enforced about the Old, and we were as fortunate as a little girl I have since known, who was sure that there could be no such place as hell, because their minister had never men tioned it. Even Sunday brought no actual terrors. I have the sweetest image of my mother sitting ready dressed for church, before my sisters had descended, and usually bearing a flower in her hand. In winter we commonly 36 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

drove to the parish church in an open sleigh, and once had an epoch-making capsize into a snowdrift. As I was seized by the legs and drawn forth, I felt like the hero of one of the Waverley novels, and as if I had been in Rob Roy's cave. No doubt we observed the Sab bath after a mild fashion, for I once played a surreptitious game of ball with my brother behind the barn on that day, and it could not have made me so very happy had it not been, as Emerson says, "drugged with the relish of fear and pain." Yet I now recall with pleasure that while my mother disapproved of all but sacred music on Sunday, she ruled that all good music was sacred; and that she let us play on Sunday evening a refreshing game of cards, geographical cards, - from which we learned that the capital of Dahomey was Abomey. Compared with the fate of many contempo raries, what soothing and harmless chains were these! In all these early recollections there has been small mention of the other sex, and yet that sweet entity was to me, and in fact to all of us boys, a matter of most momentous import ance. We were all, it now seems to me, a set of desperate little lovers, with formidable rivalries, suspicions, and jealousies; and we had names of our own devising for each juvenile maiden, A CAMBRIDGE BOYHOOD 37

by which she could be mentioned without peril of discovery. One of the older boys, being of a peculiarly inventive turn, got up a long and imaginary wooing of a black-eyed damsel who went to school in Cambridge. He showed us letters and poems, and communicated all the ups and downs of varying emotion. They were finally separated, amid mutual despair, and I do not suppose that she had ever known him by sight. We had our share of dancing-schools, always in private houses, taught sometimes by the elder Papanti, and sometimes by a most graceful woman, Miss Margaret Davis, sister of the songstress I have described. We had May~ day parties, usually at Mount Auburn, and showed in the chilly May mornings that heroic courage which Lowell plaintively attributes to children on these occasions. But all this sport ing with Amaryllis soon became secondary for us, being Cambridge boys, to the great realm of academical life, to which no girls might then aspire. That vast mysterious region lies always before the boy who is bred in a college town, alluring, exciting, threatening, as the sea lies before the sailor's son. One by one he sees his elder playmates glide away upon it, until at last his turn comes; and before I was fourteen I myself was launched. II

A CHILD OF THE COLtEGE

I COME back to Cambridge every autumn, when the leaves are falling from the trees, and the old university, like the weird witch-hazel in the groves, puts out fresh blossoms at the season when all else grows sere. It is a never failing delight to behold the hundreds of new comers who then throng our streets: boys with smooth and unworn faces, full of the zest of their own being, taking the whole world as having been made for them, which indeed it was ; - willing to do any needful kindness to an elder human being, as in rescuing him from Carriage-wheels or picking him out of the mud, but otherwise as wholesomely indifferent to his very existence as if he were a lamp-post or a horseless vehicle. If he be wise, he joyfully ac cepts the situation, and takes in it something of the pride which a father feels when his young est son overtops him by a head. Instead of grudging to the new-comers this empire of the immediate future, I feel always impelled to wel come them to it; in behalf of the human race, A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 39

I rejoice to see its vigor so lustily maintained; the visible self-confidence is well founded, and has the facts on its side. The future is theirs to command, not ours; it belongs to them even more than they think it does, and this is un doubtedly saying a good deal. This ready self-subordination to these kings of to-morrow may come, in my own case, from the fact that I am, more than any one else now living in Cambridge, except perhaps John Holmes and Professor Norton, a child of the college; and the latter is my junior, and was once in my eyes one of these very boys. All three of us were, so to speak, born in the col lege, bred to it, and interested from earliest recollection in its men. Never having been or having wished to be one of its officials, I look upon its annual harvest of youthful life with all the more dispassionate interest. Liv ing in a college town is, after all, very much like dwelling just outside of a remarkably large glass beehive, where one can watch all day long the busy little people inside; can see them going incessantly to and fro at their honey-making, pausing occasionally to salute or sting one another - and all without the slightest peril to the beholder. Life becomes rich in this safe and curious contemplation, and this is a pursuit which every boy in a college 40 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

town begins very early. It was thus that Charles Parsons and I, from the time we were allowed to go alone in the street, studied the little academical world on whose edge we dwelt. At ten years of age, it is certain, we could repeat the list of every undergraduate class alphabetically, and prided ourselves on knowing every student by sight. This was not so in credible as it would now seem, for the classes rarely had more than fifty each, the whole college counting little more than half as many as a single class now numbers. All these young fellows we not merely knew by sight, but studied individually, - their nicknames, their games, their individual haunts ; - we watched them at football or cricket; had our favorites and our aversions; waited anxiously for the time when, once or twice a year, the professor of chemistry gave many of them "exhilarat ing gas," as it was called, on the triangle then known as the Delta, and they gesticulated, made speeches, or recited poetry, as uncon scious of their self - revelation as an autobi ographer. Sometimes in summer evenings - for the college term then lasted until the middle of July - we would amuse ourselves by selecting in the street some single student, and trailing him from place to place, like the Indians of A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 4'

whom we had read in Cooper's novels; follow ing wherever he went, watching, waiting, often losing and then finding him again, and perhaps delaying our own early bedtime that we might see him through some prolonged evening call, though he was all unconscious of our watch ful care. I can still breathe the aroma of the lilac-bushes among which we ensconced our selves, and can catch a glimpse of the maiden who possibly appeared at the door to bid him a demure good - night. On other days there was the Harvard Washington Corps, or college military company, to be watched at its drill on the common, or on its proud march to the sub urban tavern where it dined,- Porter's, at what is now North Cambridge, - and on its some times devious return. 0 ecstasy of childish love for costume and rhythm and glory! In later life I have ridden at the head of a thou sand marching men, and felt no such sense of exaltation above the low earth as when I first saw my favorite elder brother, in the prescribed white trousers and black coat, with epaulets and befrogged sleeves, parading as second lieu tenant before one of the swaying platoons of the "College Company." With all this precocious interest in the students, it is needless to say that I awaited with absorbing eagerness the time when I 42 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

should enter that great little world into which my immediate playmate had preceded me; and that it was a blissful moment when I at last found myself, one autumn morning, admitted on examination, without conditions, and stand ing on the steps of University Hall, looking about with a new sense of ownership on the trees my father had planted. I was not yet fourteen, and was the youngest in my class; but never since in life have I had such a vivid sense of a career, an opportunity, a battle to be won. This is what gilds the memory of college life: that we dwelt there like Goethe's fairy Melusina or the heroine of O'Brien's "Dia mond Lens," in a real but miniature world, a microcosm of the visible universe. It seems to me that I never have encountered a type of character in the greater world which was not represented more or less among my classmates, or dealt with any thought or principle which was not discussed in elementary form in our evening walks up Brattle Street. Harvard College was then a comparatively small affair, as was the village in which it existed; but both had their day of glory, which was Commencement Day, now a merely aca demic ceremonial, but then a public festival for eastern Massachusetts. It has been so well described by both Lowell and John Holmes A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 43

that I will not dwell upon it in detail. The streets were filled with people, arriving from far and near; there were booths, fairs, horse races, encampments of alleged gamblers in out lying groves. Perhaps the most striking single illustrations of the day's importance lay in the fact that the banks in Boston were closed on that day, and that Boston gentlemen, even if not graduates of the college, often came to Cam bridge for a day or two, at that time, taking rooms and receiving their friends. My grand father, Stephen Higginson, used to come over from Brookline, take quarters in this way at Porter's tavern (the Boylston Street Porter), and keep open house, with probable punch bowl. The practice had ceased before the period of my recollection, but my cousin, the Rev. William Henry Channing, has vividly de scribed the way in which my grandfather must have set out on these expeditions.'

1 "Owing doubtless to the fact that, following the univer sal fashion of gentlemen of his position in that period, he wore his gray hair powdered, he was to me the type of all that was most ancient and venerable. His imposing figure, air, and manner filled me with ever new admiration, as, clothed in entire black, with his snowy locks and queue, and his ruffled wristbands and shirt bosom, white cravat above, and tightly buttoned gaiters or buckled shoes below, with broad brimmed hat and gold~headed cane, he descended the doorsteps to enter his carriage. This carriage, one of the large, brightly ornamented, highly polished style then in 44 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

For the rest of the year Cambridge relapsed into a kind of privacy, except that three days of "Exhibition" - a sort of minor Commence ment, with public exercises - were distributed through the terms, and brought together many strangers. At ordinary times the external status of the college was more like that of some coun try academy than that of an embryo university. There were but seven buildings inside the col lege yard, and but one outside. There are now about 3000 students, of various grades and de partments, registered in Cambridge; in 1837, when I entered college, there were but 305 such students; and in 1841, when I graduated, but 366. In like manner, Cambridge is now a city of some 8~,ooo inhabitants, whereas in 1840 it had but 8409, distributed among three villages, of which Old Cambridge, grouped round the college buildings, had less than half.

vogue, with a lofty cushioned box-seat for the coachman and platform behind for the footman, had been built in England, whence my grandfather had lately returned, and was, I pre sume, of very much the same pattern as thousands which are seen every day in all European and American cities. But it affected my imagination then as a princely equipage. So, as all boys are wont to fancy, my grandfather appeared to me the peer of the noblest. And still more stately and ele. gant was he to my imagination when attired in full costume to receive his guests at dinner or evening parties in his own house." - Memoir of William Henry Channing, by 0. B. Frothingham, p. 9. A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 45

Yet, after all, these figures make little differ ence to the boy; a crowd is a crowd, whether it be counted by hundreds or thousands, since you see at the most only those immediately pressing round you. For us, I repeat, the col lege was a world; whether larger or smaller on the outskirts was of secondary importance. It is mistakenly assumed by clergymen and editors that this little community, in its village days, was necessarily more virtuous, or at least more decorous, than now. The fact is all the other way; for the early drinking habits of soci ety still flourished, and the modern temperance agitation was but beginning. When Allston, the painter, kept the records of the Hasty Pudding Club, in rhyme, he thus described the close of the annual dinner of that frugal body "And each one to evince his spunk Vied with his neighbor to get drunk; Nor tedious was the mighty strife With these true-blooded blades of life, For less than hours two had gone When roaring mad was every one."

Allston left college in i 8oo, forty years before my day; yet it was in my own time that the Rev. Dr. John Pierce recorded in his Diary that he had seen men intoxicated at 1 B K dinners - this society being composed only of the best scholars in each class - who were 46 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

never seen in this condition at any other time. We boys used to watch the Harvard Washing ton Corps on its return from the dinner at Porter's, quite secure that some of our acquaint ances would stagger out of the ranks and find lodgment in the gutter. The regular Class Day celebration was for the seniors to gather under Liberty Tree and serve out buckets of punch to all comers. Robbing hen-roosts was common enough, and youths of good standing in my own class would organize marauding expedi tions, with large baskets, to bring back pears and melons from the market gardens in what is now Belmont. These thefts hurt no one's reputation at that day, whereas now to be suspected of them would dethrone the most popular man: he would be voted a "cad" or a "mucker;" he would be dropped from his clubs. As for the drinking habit, I have no statistics to offer, but an intoxicated student is the rarest possible sight in the streets of Cam bridge. This may not involve a clear gain in morality, but the improvement in gentlemanli ness is enormous. The college of that period has been some times described as drawing its members from a sma]ler geographical range than at present. This was of course true in a general way, yet in one respect the precise contrary was the A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 47

case. In that ante-bellum period, the Southern students were a noticeable element in the col lege, and a very conspicuous one in the Law School, being drawn thereto by the great repu tation of Judge Story; and as these youths were all reared under the influence of slavery, they contributed a far more distinctive element in Cambridge society than anything now to be seen there. The difference between the richest student from New York or California and the very poorest and most abstemious boy from some New England farm is not nearly so marked as that which then distinguished the demeanor of the average Southern from the average New England student. As a rule, the Southerners were clearly the favorites in Cambridge society: they usually had charming manners, social aptitudes, imperious ways, abun dant leisure, and plenty of money; they were graceful dancers, often musical, and sometimes well taught. On the other hand, they were often indolent, profligate, and quarrelsome; and they were almost wholly responsible for the "town and gown" quarrels, now extinct, but then not infrequent. Contributing sometimes the most brilliant young men to the Law School, they furnished also a number who, having been brought up on remote plantations and much indulged, had remained grossly ignorant. I 48 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

remember one in particular who was supposed to have entered the Law School, but who proved to be taking private lessons in some thing from Charles Devens, afterwards judge and major-general. A mystery hung about the matter till it was found that the youth, who was as showy as any of his companions in dress and bearing, was simply learning to read and write. Let us now turn back to the condition of intellectual affairs. The entrance examination of those days was by no means the boys' play that is sometimes asserted. It represented, no doubt, a year less of work than the present ex amination; yet it included some points not now made obligatory, as for instance the render ing of English into Greek and Latin. We were also called upon to translate at sight from authors not previously read, although this provision did not appear in the catalogues, and is usually cited as of more recent origin. Once fairly inside, my class was lucky enough to encounter a very exceptional period, - the time, namely, when a temporary foray into the elective system took place, anticipating in a small way the very desirable results which have followed from its later application; although that first experiment was, unluckily, discon tinued in a few years under a more conserva A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 49

tive president. Meanwhile, the class of 1841 was one of the very few which enjoyed its benefits. Under the guidance of George Tick nor, the method had long been applied to the modern languages; but we were informed one day, to our delight, that it was to be extended also to mathematics, with a prospect of further expansion. As a matter of fact, the word "elective" did not appear on the college cata logues until 184 1-42, but for two years previous this special announcement about mathematics had been given in a footnote. The spirit of a new freedom began at once to make itself felt in other departments; the Latin and Greek professors, for instance, beginning to give lec tures, though in an irregular way, in addition to their usual duty of extracting from us what small knowledge we possessed. The reason why the experiment was made with mathe matics was understood to be that Professor Peirce had grown weary of driving boys through the differential calculus by force, and Profes sor Channing had declared that all taste for mathematics was a matter of special inspira tion. For myself, I eagerly took this study as an elective, with about ten classmates; nor had I any reason to repent the choice. Professor Benjamin Peirce, our mathematical teacher, was then put, by general opinion, at the 50 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

head of American mathematicians, - a place which, I believe, he still retains by tradition. In his later years, and after the abandonment of the temporary elective method, he may have be come discouraged or apathetic, but when I knew him he was in his prime, and he was to me of all teachers the most inspiring and delightful. He was then a very handsome man, with the most eager and ardent manner, alternating with deep absorption, and he gave beyond all others the effect of original and creative genius. We studied, by an added stroke of good luck, his "Curves and Functions," which was just pass ing through the press, and the successive parts of which were bound up for our use. This in creased the charm; it seemed like mathematics in the process of construction. I was already old enough to appreciate the wonderful compact ness and close reasoning of these volumes, and to enter with eager zest into filling the inter mediate gaps afforded by the long steps often taken from one equation to another. Dr. Bow ditch, the translator of Laplace's "M6canique C6leste," used to say that whenever he came to one of Laplace's "Whence it plainly appears," he was in for an hour or two of toil in order to make this exceeding plainness visible. It was often so with Peirce's books, but this enhanced the pleasure of the chase. He himself took A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 5'

part in it: a thought would sometimes flash into his mind, and he would begin to work it out on the blackboard before our eyes; for getting our very existence, he would labor away with the chalk, writing out with light ning rapidity a series of equations, smaller and smaller, chasing his scientific prey down into the utmost right-hand corner of the black board, and finally turning to us with a sigh when the pursuit was ended. Again was the science of mathematics being created before our very eyes; it was like being present at the first discoveries of some old Greek or Arabian geometrician. Peirce had also the delightful quality of being especially interested in all of this his first voluntary class, and indeed of greatly overrating their merits. When I left college, he gave me an indorsement which took my breath away, and had me placed, at eigh teen, on the examining committee in his de partment. Years after, when in a fair way to pass some time in jail after an anti-slavery riot, I met him, and said that I had reserved that period of imprisonment for reviewing mathe matics and reading Laplace. His fine eyes kindled, and he replied, "In that case, I sin cerely hope that you may go there." He was then vehemently opposed to the abolitionists, and it seemed a double blessing to gag one of 52 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

them and at the same time create a mathema tician. The indictment was, unluckily, quashed, so that both his hopes were disappointed. Next to Peirce's teaching came, without question, both in stimulus and in attractions, the English course of Professor Edward Tyr rel Channing. Professor Wendell has lately spoken of the present standard of training in English composition at Harvard as if it were quite a new thing; but with some opportunity of observing it, I have never had reason to think it any new departure as compared with that given by Professor Channing down to 1841 at least. The evidence would seem to be that between that period and 1846, when Pro fessor Child graduated, Professor Channing had in some way lost his hold upon his pupils as his years advanced; so that when Professor Child succeeded to the chair, in 185 I, it was with a profound distrust in the whole affair, insomuch that the very department of rhetoric and oratory came near being wiped out of exist ence, and was saved by the indignant protest of the late Charles Francis Adams. Certain it is that this department was, in my time, by far the most potent influence in de termining college rank, and therefore in stim ulating ambition. We wrote themes every fortnight and forensics once a month; and as A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 53

these were marked on a scale of 48, and or dinary recitations on a scale of 8, the impor tance of this influence may be seen. Never in my life have I had to meet such exacting criticism on anything written as came from Professor Channing, and never have I had any praise so encouraging as his. My marks were often second in the class, sometimes equaling -0 day of glory ! - those of my classmate, Francis Edward Parker, who was easily first; and to have a passage read to the class for praise, even anonymously, was beyond all other laurels, though the satisfaction might be marred occasionally by the knowledge that my elder sister had greatly helped in that particular sen tence. When it is considered that Channing's method reared most of the well-known writers whom New England was then producing, that it was he who trained Emerson, C. F. Adams, Hedge, A. P. Peabody, Felton, Hillard, Winthrop, Holmes, Sumner, Motley, Phillips, Bowen, Lovering, Torrey, Dana, Lowell, Tho reau, Hale, Thomas Hill, Child, Fitzedward Hall, Lane, and Norton, - it will be seen that the classic portion of our literature came largely into existence under him. He fulfilled the aspiration attributed to Increase Mather when he wished to become president of Harvard Col lege: to mould not merely the teaching, but 54 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

the teachers, - non lapides do/are, sed archi tectos. The controlling influence of a college is determined, of course, by its officers, and I have never felt that we had anything in respect of which we could complain. The experience lately described by an elder contemporary of discovering that he personally knew more than at least the tutors of his time was one which never troubled me. Two of the four tutors, Bowen and Lovering, were men eminent as scholars from youth to old age; the third, Jones Very, was a man of genius; and the fourth, Charles Mason, - now Judge Mason, of Fitchburg, - certainly knew incomparably more of Latin than I did. Of the older professors, Felton was a cultivated Greek scholar, and Beck brought to Latin the thoroughness of his German drill. I need not say what it was to read French with Longfellow; and it is plea sant to remember that once - during one of those preposterous little rebellions which then occurred every two or three years, and which have wholly disappeared under a freer disci pline - when the students were gathered in the college yard, and had refused to listen to several professors, there was a hush when Longfellow appeared, and my classmate, John Revere, cried out, "We will hear Professor A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 55

Longfellow, for he always treats us like gentle men." Longfellow was the first, I think, to introduce the prefix "Mr." in addressing stu dents, a thing now almost universaL For our other modern-language teachers, we had Pietro Bachi, a picturesque Italian refugee; in German, Bernard Roelker, since well known as a lawyer in New York; and we had that delightful old Francis Sales, whom Lowell has commemorated, as our teacher of Spanish. In him we had a man who might have stepped bodily out of the Gil Blas and Don Quixote he taught. We never knew whether he was French or Spanish. He was then about sixty five, and his robust head and shoulders, his pigtail and powdered hair, with his quaint ac cent, made him seem the survival of some pic turesque and remote age. He was, moreover, extremely indulgent, gave the highest marks for recitations, and was in all respects a favor ite. A classmate who sat next me, George Hay, took delight in inflicting upon the innocent old man the most incredible or old-fashioned English oaths as equivalent to the quaint Span ish expletives; and when he gravely introduced "Odds' fish" or "Gogzounds," Mr. Sales would look bewildered for a moment, and then roll out his stentorian "Ha! ha! ha! By Jorge!" in a way to add still further to the list of unex CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

pected phrases, and to make the dusty room in Massachusetts Hall jubilant for that day. President Quincy was popular among us, but lost direct weight in our minds through his failure of memory and the necessity of con stantly telling him who we were. Dr. Walker we admired because of his wise and sententious preaching, and his reputation, not unjustified, of peculiar penetration into character. Jared Sparks lectured on history, under great disad vantages; and I have always been gratified that it was from him - a man accounted unim aginative - that for the first time the thought was suggested to us of the need of imagina tion to an historian, not for the purpose of invention, but for re-creating a given period and shaping it in the representation. Dr. Har ris, the librarian and naturalist, was always a delightful teacher and friend, and I espe cially enjoyed attendance on his private class in entomology, in the evening, for which we got no college credits. Sometimes we took walks with him, or brought him new plants or but terflies. I was secretary of the college Nat ural History Society for a time, and in looking back on the various reports written by me for its meetings, it is interesting to see that this wholly voluntary work had a freshness and vigor beyond what I can now trace in any of A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 57

the "themes" of which Professor Channing thought so well. There is no greater mark of progress in the university than the expansion of its electives to include the natural sciences. My own omnivorousness in study was so great that I did not suffer very much from our re stricted curriculum; but there were young men in my time who would have graduated in these later days with highest honors in some depart ment of physics or biology, but who were then at the very foot of the class, and lost for life the advantage of early training in the studies they loved. Akin to this modern gain and equally unquestionable is the advantage now enjoyed in the way of original research. Every year young men of my acquaintance come to me for consultation about some thesis they are preparing in history or literature,, and they little know the envy with which they inspire their adviser; that they should be spared from the old routine to investigate anything for them selves seems such a happiness. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind, as an extra-collegiate observer, of the vast im provement made by the elective system; and I should like to see it extended yet more widely, so as to annul absolutely all distinction in grade between "academic" and "scientific" courses. The day of universal scholarship, when Plutarch 58 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

or Bacon could go the round of knowledge and label every item, is as extinct as the saurian epoch. The world is simply too large. The most enthusiastic scholar must forego ten times as many paths as he can pursue, and must re sign himself to be a specialist. It is inevitable, but it has obvious disadvantages. The last of the old-fashioned Cambridge scholars of whom one could ask a miscellaneous question, with prospect of answer, died with the late Professor Torrey. I now know that I can make no in quiry so difficult but there is probably some man in Cambridge who can answer it; yet it may take a week of investigation to ascertain just who that man is. On the other hand, the things which these wise men do not know are constantly surprising, at least to a survivor of the less specializing period. I have had a professor of political economy stop me in the street to ask who Charles Brockden Brown was; and when I suggested to a senior student who was seeking a lecturer for some society that he might ask John Fiske, he replied that he had never heard his name. Now, I knew all about Charles Brockden Brown before I was twelve years old, from Sparks's "American Bio graphy," and it was not easy to see how any one could read the newspapers, even three or four years ago, and not be familiar with the name of A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 59

John Fiske. Yet this specialization extends, in truth, to all classes of the community. A Boston lawyer, the other day, told a friend of mine that, in his opinion, the Harvard pro fessors were less eminent than formerly. My friend replied with truth that the only differ ence was that they were less likely to be all round men, known to everybody; but that the teachers of to-day were more likely to be emi nent in some particular department, in which they usually knew far more than their prede cessors. "There is, for instance," he said, "Professor Farlow, who has an international reputation as an authority in cryptogamic bot any." "I never even heard of him," said the lawyer, "nor of cryptogamic botany, either." The same change is apparent in the vary ing standards of athletic exercise. To those who loved, as I did, the old-time football, the very thud of the ball, the scent of bruised grass, the mighty rush of a hundred men, the swift and cool defense, - there is something insufficient in the presence of a whole univer sity sitting and shivering in the chill wind around an arena where a few picked gladiators push and wrestle; while those who know every point of the new contest feel a natural con tempt for the crudities of the old. So those who now regard with surprise, or even lift with 6o CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

irreverence, the heavy three-cornered bats and large balls of the game we called cricket - the very implements used by my own class are deposited at the Hemenway Gymnasium - do not know that their comments are like those of Saladin on the heavy sword of King Richard, which ponderous weapon, after all, did good service in its day. The joy of athletic exercises is a part of the youth to which they belong, and does not depend upon the advance of sci ence; nor is the admiration of their heroes a matter of to-day only. I never saw the late Charles Franklin Shimmin, of Boston, up to his dying day, that I did not recall the thrill of admiration for his unequaled "rushes" on the football field; and when we casually met, we always talked about them. Of the two best bowlers in my class, the one, Charles Sedg wick, was at the head of the class in scholar ship, and the other, -Eben William Rollins, was far down in the rank list, but they were equally our heroes at the cricketing hour. The change chiefly perceptible to me to-day is that whereas we were proud of Sedgwick's scholarship as well as of his bowling, it is likely that, in the present intense absorption in what may be called vicarious athletics, any amount of intel lectual eminence would count but as the dust on the fly-wheel. In this respect we go a little A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 6i

further just now, I fancy, than our English kinsfolk. It is a rare thing in our American Cambridge to hear of any student as being admired for his scholarship; but when I was taken, twenty years ago, to see the intercolle giate races at the older Cambridge, my friends were as careful to point out the men who were "great swells" in chemistry or in Greek as to call my attention to "the celebrated stroke, Goldie." The class to which I belonged - the class of 1841 - was compact and tolerably well united, though small. It had perhaps more than the usual share of class feeling, which probably dated from the time when we had the rare experience of defeating the sophomores at the opening game of footbalL There was an im pression that the Faculty were rather afraid of us, a view which would probably have much astonished those worthy gentlemen had it ever reached their ears. The strongest impression which is conveyed by looking back on our num ber collectively, after a half century's lapse, is that of the utter impossibility of casting in advance the horoscope of a whole set of young men. The class numbered several who after wards won distinction in different walks in life; and while the actual careers of some might have been predicted, there were other lives 62 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

which could not possibly have been anticipated by any of us. It required no great foresight to guess that Edward Clarke and Francis Minot would be physicians, and even eminent ones; that Rufus Woodward, of Worcester, would also be a physician, and a naturalist besides; that Thomas Church Haskell Smith, of Ohio, who was universally known among us as "Captain Smith," and was the natural leader of the class, in case of civil war would become Maj or General Smith, and chief of staff in the Army of the Potomac. Wickham Hoffman, of New York, showed in college the same steadfast and manly qualities which made him also prominent during the war as a staff officer at New Orleans, and afterwards as secretary of the American legation during the siege of Paris. Other in stances might be cited; but, on the other hand, our class produced three men, all well known in later life, whose precise paths were such as no one of the class could ever by any possibility have guessed. Frank Parker, our first scholar, might naturally, we should all have said, reach the Supreme Bench in rapid strides; our am bition for him was unbounded; but that he should, instead of this, become the greatest business lawyer in Boston, that he should have charge of vast estates, that he should die rich, that his pall-bearers should be bank presidents A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 63

and millionaires, this was something that no one could have credited in advance. He had to be very economical in college, as had most of us, - he could go without what he wanted, - but certainly I never surmised in him any peculiar gift for the especially judicious investment of a half dollar. It is a curious illustration of what it is now the fashion to call "heredity" that when this same remark was made to the late Dr. A. P. Peabody, who had been Parker's pas tor, he replied that it was perfectly true so far as it went, but that any one who had known Parker's father would have comprehended the whole affair. The latter, he said, although a clergyman, was the business adviser of half the men in his parish. In another instance, which was yet more re markable, I know of no such explanation. Not a classmate of Henry Fowle Durant's would ever have dreamed of the two achievements which have probably secured for his name a longer remembrance than will be awarded to any other member of the class; no one would have deemed it possible that he would make a fortune by the practice of criminal law, and then devote it to founding a woman's college. He lived out of the college yard, was little known in the class, was to all appearances in dolent or without concentration - one of the 64 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

men whose favorite literature lies in old English plays. His very name was not that by which he afterwards became noted; it being originally Henry Welles Smith, and being changed subse quently to gratify a relative who was also his benefactor. Stranger than even this transformation of name and career was the third bit of the unex pected. The only member of the class who ever landed in the state's prison was precisely and unequivocally the most dignified and re spectable man we mustered, - a man abso lutely stainless as we knew him, whose whole aspect and bearing carried irresistible weight, and who was chosen by acclamation as the treasurer of our class fund. In truth, it was his face and manner that were his ruin; he was a lawyer and had charge of estates; trustful widows and orphans thronged round him and believed in him up to the moment the prison doors opened to receive him; he could no more resist such perilous confidence than could Shakespeare's Autolycus, and might say with him, "If I had a mind to be honest, I see Fortune would not suffer ~ My only really intimate friend in the class was Parker, already named, who, although two years older than myself, and of more staidness of temperament and maturity of character, had A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE

great influence over me, and was wonderfully patient with my often serious errors. I fre quently spent nights at his room, and we had few secrets from each other. All this was in a certain way creditable to us both, - though more so to him, in proportion as he was the superior, - inasmuch as it was a period when the ambition for college rank was intensely strong, and we were running neck and neck for the first place, through the time of our greatest intimacy. He was the better writer, reasoner, and classicist; while I was fond of mathematics, which he hated, and was more successful than he in modern languages. Later, I discovered that we had been extremely close together in rank, most of the time, I sometimes passing him; and that he came out first by only some thirty or forty marks among many thousands. It was the only fitting conclu sion; and as we were greatly separated, in ma turer life, by his conservative and my radical tendencies, I rej oice to record this tribute to his memory. He had, even while in college, a certain cynicism, which was later very much developed, and rather marred his popularity; but his influence on us all was of the greatest value, as it was afterwards in the whole com munity where he lived. I formed in college two other friendships, 66 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

outside my own class, both with men who sub sequently rendered real service to literature and art. One was the late Charles Callahan Perkins, who became the author of works on the Tuscan and Italian sculptors, and was practically the founder of the Normal Art School in Boston, and of the whole system of art instruction in the public schools of Mas sachusetts. He was my room-mate during the senior year, and a most attractive person; hand some, refined, manly, without brilliant gifts, but with the most cultivated tastes and - a convenience quite rare among us - a liberal income. He was one of the few instances I have known of a man's being really helped and enlarged in his career by the possession of wealth - or what then passed for wealth - in youth. The other companion, who did more for my literary tastes than all other friends, was the late Levi Lincoln Thaxter, who in after-life helped more than any one to make Browning and Fitzgerald known in this coun try, - they being more widely read here in each case, for a time, than in their own land. This was the more remarkable as Thaxter never saw either of them, although he corre sponded with Browning, who also wrote the inscription for his grave. Thaxter was about my age, though he was, like Perkins, two years A CHILD OF THE COLLEGE 67

younger in college; he was not a high scholar, but he was an ardent student of literature, and came much under the influence of his cousin, Maria White, and of Lowell, her betrothed. Thaxter first led me to Emerson and to Haz litt; the latter being for both of us a tempo rary and the former a lifelong source of influ ence. We were both lovers of Longfellow, also, and used to sit at the open window every New Year's Eve and read aloud his "Midnight Mass to the Dying Year." Thaxter was an en thusiastic naturalist, which was another bond of union, and he bequeathed this taste to his youngest son, now an assistant professor of bot any in Harvard University. To Thaxter I owe, finally, the great privilege of borrowing from Maria White the first thin volumes of Tenny son's poems, which seemed to us, as was once said of Keats, to "double the value of words;" and we both became, a few years later, sub scribers to the original yellow-covered issue of Browning's "Bells and Pomegranates." Thax ter's personal modesty and reticence, and the later fame of his poet-wife, Celia, have obscured him to the world; but he was one of the most loyal and high-minded of men. At my graduation I was four months short of eighteen, and my purpose was to teach for a few years, and then to study law. This early 68 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

maturity had, however, one obvious advantage: that it would plainly give me more time to turn round, to pursue general study, and, if need be, to revise my choice of a pursuit. I ultimately used the interval for just these purposes, and was so far a gainer. In all other respects my youthfulness was a great disadvantage, and I have often dissuaded others from following my example in entering college too young. If they disregard the remonstrance, as is usually the case, great patience and charity are due them. The reason for this is that precocity scarcely ever extends through all the faculties at once, and those who are older than their years in some respects are almost always younger in others, - this being nature's way of restoring the balance. Even if intellect and body are alike precocious, the judgment and the moral sense may remain weak and imma ture. Development in other respects, there fore, creates false expectations and brings un foreseen temptations of its own. This was, at any rate, the result in my case, although it took me several years to find it out. The experience of those years demands, however, a chapter by itself. III

THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven."

WORDSWORTH, The Prelude, Book XI.

THE above was the high - sounding name which was claimed for their own time by the youths and maidens who, under the guidance of Emerson, Parker, and others, took a share in the seething epoch sometimes called vaguely Transcendentalism. But as these chapters are to be mainly autobiographic, it is well to state with just what outfit I left college in 1841. I had a rather shallow reading knowledge of six languages, English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, and Greek, and had been brought in contact with some of the best books in each of these tongues. I may here add that I picked up at a later period German, Portuguese, and Hebrew, with a little Swedish; and that I hope to live long enough to learn at least the alphabet in Russian. Then I had acquired enough of the higher mathematics to have a pupil or two in that branch; something of the 70 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

forms of logic and of Locke's philosophy 'with the criticisms of the French eclectics upon it; a smattering of history and political economy; some crude acquaintance with field natural history; some practice in writing and debating; a passion for poetry and imaginative literature; a voracious desire for all knowledge and all action; and an amount of self-confidence which has now, after more than half a century, sadly diminished. It will be seen that this was an outfit more varied than graduates of the present day are apt to possess, but that it was also more superficial; their knowledge of what they know being often far more advanced as well as more solidly grounded than was mine. No matter; I was a happy boy, ankle-deep in a yet unfathomed sea. I had two things in addition not set down in the college curriculum, but of the utmost influence on my future career. One of these has always been to me somewhat inexplicable. Cambridge was then a place of distinctly graded society, - more so, probably, than it is now. Lowell has admirably described the superb way in which old Royal Morse, the village con stable and auctioneer, varied the courtesy of his salutation according to the social position of his acquaintance. I can remember no conver sation around me looking toward the essential THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 71

equality of the human race, except as it was found in the pleased curiosity with which my elder brothers noted the fact that the Presi dent's man-servant, who waited at table during his dinner parties, became on the muster field colonel of the militia regiment, and as such gave orders to Major Quincy, there his subordinate, but at other times his employer. In each pro fessor's family there was apt to be a country boy " living out," "doing chores "and attending school; these boys often rose to influence and position in later life, and their children or de scendants are now professors in the university and leaders in Cambridge society. The "town school" was distinctly a grade school; I had never entered it; did not play much with the "town boys," and was rather afraid of them. Yet it must have been that there was left over from the American Revolution something of the popular feeling then inspired, for without aid or guidance I was democratic in feeling; longed to know something of all sorts and con ditions of men, and had a distinct feeling that I should like to be, for a year or two, a mechanic of some kind - a carpenter or blacksmith in order to place myself in sympathy with all. The nearest I ever came to this was in making 3ome excursions with an elder brother who, as engineer, was laying out the track of the Old 72 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

Colony Railroad, and who took me as "hind chain man" at a dollar a day. I still recall with delight the sense of honest industry, the tramping through the woods, and the occasional dinners at farmhouses. It was at one of these festivities that, when my brother had eaten one piece of mince pie but declined a second help ing, our host remarked with hospitable dignity, "Consult your feelings, sir, about the meat pie." Another most important change was passing in me at about this time; the sudden develop ment of social aptitudes hitherto dormant. As an overgrown boy - for I was six feet tall at fourteen - I had experienced all the agonies of bashfulness in the society of the other sex, though greatly attracted to it. I find it diffi cult to convince my associates of later years that I then habitually sat mute while others chattered. A word or two of remonstrance from my mother had in a single day corrected this, during my senior year, so far as the fam ily table was concerned; and this emboldened me to try the experiment on a wider field. I said to myself, thinking of other young men who made themselves quite agreeable, "These youths are not your superiors, - perhaps, in the recitation - room or on the playground, hardly your equals; why not cope with them else THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 73

where?" Thus influenced, I conquered myself in a single evening and lost my shyness for ever. The process was unique, so far as I know, and I have often recommended it to shy young men. Being invited to a small party, I considered beforehand what young ladies would probably be there. With each one I had, of course, something in common, - kinship, or neighborhood, or favorite pursuit. This would do, I reasoned, for a starting-point; so I put down on a small sheet of paper what I would say to each, if I happened to be near her. It worked like a charm; I found myself chatting away, the whole evening, and heard the next day that everybody was surprised at the trans formation. I have to this day the little bit of magic paper, on which I afterwards un derscored, before sleeping, the points actually used. It set me free; after this I went often to tolerably large parties in Cambridge and Boston, in the latter case under guidance of my brother Waldo, who had now graduated from the Har vard Washington Corps into the Boston Cadets, and was an excellent social pilot. I saw the really agreeable manners which then prevailed in the little city, and cannot easily be convinced that there are now in the field any youths at once so manly and so elegant as were the two 74 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

especial leaders among the beaux of that day, John Lothrop Motley and his brother-in-law, John Lewis Stackpole. It did not surprise me to read in later days that the former was habit ually addressed as "Milord," to a degree that vexed him, by waiters in Continental hotels. Such leaders were doubtless good social mod els, as was also the case with my brother; but I had more continuous influences in the friend ship of two fair girls, both of whom were frank, truthful, and attractive. One of them - Maria Fay of convent fame, already mentioned - was a little older than myself, while the other, just my own age, Mary Devens, was the younger sister of Charles Devens, afterwards eminent in war and peace. She died young, but I shall al ways be grateful for the good she unconsciously did me; and I had with both the kind of cor dial friendship, without a trace of love-making, yet tinged with refined sentiment, which is for every young man a most fortunate school. They counseled and reprimanded and laughed at me, when needful, in a way that I should not have tolerated from boys at that time, nor yet from my own sisters, wise and judicious though these were. Added to all this was a fortunate visit, during my last year in college, to some cousins on a Virginia plantation, where my uncle, Major Storrow, had married into the THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 75

Carter family, and where I experienced the hos pitality and gracious ways of Southern life. A potent influence was also preparing for me in Cambridge in a peculiarly fascinating circle of young people, - more gifted, I cannot help thinking, than any later coterie of the same kind, - which seemed to group itself round James Lowell and Maria White, his betrothed, who were known among the members as their "King and Queen." They called themselves "The Brothers and Sisters," being mainly made up in that way: the Whites of Water town and their cousins the Thaxters; the Storys from Cambridge; the Hales and the Tuckermans from Boston; the Kings from Salem, and others. They had an immense and hilarious intimacy, rarely, however, for some reason, culminating in intermarriage; they read the same books, and had perpetual gatherings and picnics, their main headquarters being the large colonial house of the White family in Watertown. My own point of contact with them was remote, but real; my mother had re moved, when her family lessened, to a smaller house built by my elder brother, and belonging in these latter days to Radcliffe College. This was next door to the Fay House of that insti tution, then occupied by Judge Fay. And as my friend Maria Fay was a cousin of some of 76 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

the Brothers and Sisters, they made the house an occasional rendezvous; and as there were attractive younger kindred whom I chanced to know, I was able at least to look through the door of this paradise of youth. Lowell's first volume had just been pub lished, and all its allusions were ground of ro rnance for us all; indeed, he and his betrothed were to me, as they seemed to be for those of their circle, a modernized Petrarch and Laura or even Dante and Beatrice; and I watched them with unselfish reverence. Their love-letters, about which they were extremely frank, were passed from hand to hand, and sometimes reached me through Thaxter. I have some of Maria White's ballads in her own handwriting; and I still know by heart a letter which she wrote to Thaxter, about the delay in her marriage, - "It is easy enough to be married; the newspaper corners show us that, every day; but to live and to be happy as sim ple King and Queen, without the gifts of for tune, this is a triumph that suits my nature better." Probably all the atmosphere around this pair of lovers had a touch of exaggeration, a slight greenhouse aroma, but it brought a pure and ennobling enthusiasm; and whenever I was fortunate enough to hear Maria White sing or "say" ballads in moonlight evenings it THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 77

seemed as if I were in Boccaccio's Florentine gardens. If this circle of bright young people was not strictly a part of the Transcendental Move ment, it was yet born of "the Newness." Lowell and Story, indeed, both wrote for "The Dial," and Maria White had belonged to Mar garet Fuller's classes. There was, moreover, passing through the whole community a wave of that desire for a freer and more ideal life which made Story turn aside from his father's profession to sculpture, and made Lowell for sake law after his first client. It was the time when Emerson wrote to Carlyle, "We are all a little wild here with numberless proj ects of social reform; not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." I myself longed at times to cut free from prescribed bondage, and not, in Lowell's later phrase, to "pay so much of life for a liv ing" as seemed to be expected. I longed anew, under the influence of George Sand and of Mrs. Child's "Letters from New York," to put myself on more equal terms with that vast army of hand-workers who were ignorant of much that I knew, yet could do so much that I could not. Under these combined motives I find that I carefully made out, at one time, a project of going into the cultivation of peaches, an in 78 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

dustry then prevalent in New England, but now practically abandoned, - thus securing freedom from study and thought by moderate labor of the hands. This was in 1843, two years before Thoreau tried a similar project with beans at Walden Pond; and also before the time when George and Burrill Curtis un dertook to be farmers at Concord. A like course was actually adopted and successfully pursued through life by another Harvard man a few years older than myself, the late Marston Watson, of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Such things were in the air, and even those who were not swerved by "the Newness" from their intended pursuits were often greatly modified as to the way in which these were undertaken; as when the recognized leader of a certain class of the Harvard Law School abandoned, from conscientious scruples, the career of a practicing lawyer, and spent his life as a conveyancer. What turned me away from the study of the law was not this moral scruple, but what was doubtless an innate preference, strengthened by the influence of one man and one or two books. After leaving college I taught for six months as usher in the boarding-school at Ja maica Plain, kept by Mr. Stephen Minot Weld; and then, greatly to my satisfaction, became private tutor to the three young sons of my THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 79

cousin, Stephen Higginson Perkins, a Boston merchant, residing in a pretty cottage which he had designed for himself in Brookline. In him I encountered the most attractive man I had yet met and the one who was most to influence me. He was indeed a person of unique qualities and great gifts; he was in the prime of life, handsome and refined, a widower, whose modest household was superintended by a maiden sister; his training had been utterly unlike my regular academical career; he had been sent to Germany to school, under the guidance of Edward Everett, then to the East and West Indies as supercargo, then into busi ness, but not very successfully as yet. This pursuit he hated and disapproved; all his tastes were for art, in which he was at that time per haps the best connoisseur in Boston, and he had contrived by strict economy to own several good paintings which he bequeathed later to the Boston Art Museum, - a Reynolds, a Van der Velde, and a remarkable oil copy of the Sistine Madonna by Moritz Retzsch. These were the first fine paintings I had ever seen, except the Copleys then in the Harvard College Library, and his society, with that he assembled round him, was to me a wholly new experience. He disapproved and distrusted all classical train ing, and was indifferent to mathematics; but he 8o CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

had read largely in French and German liter ature, and he introduced me to authors of per manent interest, such as Heine and Paul Louis Courier. He was also in a state of social revolt, enhanced by a certain shyness and by deafness; full of theories, and ready to encourage all inde pendent thinking. He was withal affectionate and faithful. I was to teach his boys four hours a day, no more; they were most interesting, though not always easy to manage. I was young enough to take a ready part in all their sports, and we often had school in the woods adjoin ing the house, perhaps sitting in large trees and interrupting work occasionally to watch a weasel gliding over a rock or a squirrel in the boughs. I took the boys with me in my ram bles and it was a happy time. Another sister of Stephen Perkins's, a woman of great per sonal attractions, kept house for her father, who lived near by, Mr. Samuel G. Perkins, younger brother of Colonel Thomas H. Perkins, then the leading merchant of Boston. Mr. Samuel Perkins had been at one time a partner of my grandfather and had married his daughter, but had retired, not very successful, and was one of the leading horticulturists near Boston, the then famous "Boston nectarine" being a fruit of his introducing. His wife, Barbara Higgin THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 8x

son, my aunt, had been a belle in her youth, but had ripened into an oddity, and lived in Boston during the winter and in a tiny cot tage at Nahant during the summer, for the professed reason that the barberry blossoms in the Brookline lanes made her sneeze. The summer life around Boston was then an affair so unlike anything now to be found in the vicinity as to seem like something observed in another country or period. Socially speak ing, it more resembled the plantation life of the South or the ranch life of the West. Many of the prosperous people lived in Boston all sum mer, with occasional trips to Nahant or Sara toga or Ballston, or for the more adventurous a journey by stage among the White Mountains, encountering rough roads and still rougher tav erns. But there existed all around Boston, and especially in Roxbury, Brookline, and Milton, a series of large estates with ample houses, all occupied by people connected in blood or intimacy, who drove about and exchanged calls in summer afternoons. Equipages were sim ple; people usually drove themselves; there were no liveries, but the hospitality was pro fuse. My uncle Perkins was a poor man com pared with his rich brother; there was a theory that his beautiful pears and nectarines were to be a source of profit, but I fear that the hal 82 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

ance-sheet, if perchance there ever was any, would have shown otherwise. No matter, he had the frank outdoor hospitality of a retired East India merchant, which he was; every afternoon, at a certain hour, sherry and madeira were set out on the sideboard in the airy parlor, with pears, peaches, grapes, nectarines, straw berries and the richest cream, and we knew that visitors would arrive. Cousins and friends came, time-honored acquaintances of the head of the house, eminent public men, Mr. Prescott the historian, or Daniel Webster himself, re ceived like a king. Never did I feel a greater sense of an honor conferred than when that regal black-browed man once selected me as the honored messenger to bring more cream for his chocolate. There was sometimes, though rarely, a little music; and there were now and then simple games on the lawn, - battledore or grace hoops, but as yet croquet and tennis and golf were not, and the resources were limited. In winter, the same houses were the scene of family parties with sleigh-riding and skating and coasting; but the summer life was simply a series of outdoor receptions, from house to house. It must be noted that Brookline was then, as now, the garden suburb of Boston, beyond all others; the claim was only compara THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 83

tive, and would not at all stand the test of Eng.. lish gardening or even of our modern meth ods, except perhaps in the fruit produced. I remember that Stephen Perkins once took an English visitor, newly arrived, to drive about the region, and he was quite ready to admire everything he saw, though not quite for the reason that his American host expected. "It is all so rough and wild" was his comment. Into this summer life, on the invitation of my cousin Barbara Channing, who spent much time in Brookline, there occasionally came dele gations of youths from Brook Farm, then flour ishing. Among these were George and Burrill Curtis, and Lamed, with Charles Dana, late editor of the "New York Sun;" all presenta ble and agreeable, but the first three peculiarly costumed. It was then very common for young men in college and elsewhere to wear what were called blouses, - a kind of hunter's frock made at first of brown holland belted at the waist, - these being gradually developed into garments of gay-colored chintz, sometimes, it was said, an economical transformation of their sisters' skirts or petticoats. All the young men of this party except Dana wore these gay garments and bore on their heads little round and visorless caps with tassels. Mr. Perkins, whose attire was always defiantly plain, re 84 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

garded these vanities with ill-concealed disap proval, but took greatly to Dana, who dressed like a well-to-do young farmer and was always handsome and manly. My uncle declared him to be full of sense and knowledge, and the others to be nonsensical creatures. Dana was indeed the best all-round man at Brook Farm, a good teacher, editor, and farmer, - but was held not to be quite so zealous or unselfish for the faith as were some of the others. It was curious that when their public meetings were held in Boston, he was their most effec tive speaker, while I cannot remember that George William Curtis, afterwards so eloquent, ever opened his lips at all. I was but twice at Brook Farm, once driving over there in a sleigh during a snowstorm, to convey my cousin Barbara to a fancy ball at "the Community," as it was usually called, where she was to appear in a pretty creole dress made of madras handkerchiefs and brought by Stephen Perkins from the West Indies. She was a most attractive and popular person, and was enthusiastic about Brook Farm, where she went often~. being a friend of Mrs. Ripley, who was its "leading lady." Again I once went for her in summer and stayed for an hour, watching the various interesting figures, includ ing George William Curtis, who was walking THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 85

about in shirtsleeves, with his boots over his trou sers, yet was escorting a young maiden with that elegant grace which never left him. It was a curious fact that he, who was afterwards so eminent, was then held wholly secondary in interest to his handsome brother Burrill, whose Raphaelesque face won all hearts, and who afterwards disappeared from view in England, surviving only in memory as Our Cousin the Curate, in "Lotus-Eating." But if I did not see much of Brook Farm on the spot, I met its members frequently at the series of exciting meetings for Social Reform in Boston, where the battle raged high between Associationists and Communists, the leader of the latter being John A. Collins. Defenders of the established order also took part; one of the best of the latter being Arthur Pickering, a Boston mer chant; and in all my experience I have never heard a speech so thrilling and effective as that in which Henry Clapp, then a young radical mechanic, answered Pickering's claim that indi viduality was better promoted by the existing method of competition. Clapp was afterwards the admired leader of a Bohemian clique in New York and had a melancholy career; but that speech did more than anything else to make me at least a halfway socialist for life. The Brook Farm people were also to be met 86 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

occasionally at Mrs. Harrington's confectionery shop in School Street, where they took econo mical refreshments; and still oftener at Miss Elizabeth Peabody's foreign bookstore in West Street, which was a part of the educational in fluences of the period. It was an atom of a shop, partly devoted to the homceopathic medi cines of her father, a physician; and she alone in Boston, I think, had French and German books for sale. There I made further acquaint ance with Cousin and Jouffroy, with Constant's "De la Religion" and Leroux' "De l'Human it6," the relics of the French Eclecticism, then beginning to fade, but still taught in colleges. There, too, were Schubert's "Geschichte der Seele" and many of the German balladists who were beginning to enthrall me. There was also Miss Peabody herself, desultory, dreamy, but insatiable in her love for knowledge and for helping others to it. James Freeman Clarke said of her that she was always engaged in sup plying some want that had first to be created; it might be Dr. Kraitsir's lectures on language, or General Bem's historical chart. She always preached the need, but never accomplished the supply until she advocated the kindergarten; there she caught up with her mission and came to identify herself with its history. She lived to be very old, and with her broad benevolent THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 87

face and snowy curls was known to many as "The Grandmother of Boston." I best asso ciate her with my last interview, a little before her death, when I chanced to pick her out of a snowdrift into which she had sunk overwhelmed during a furious snowsquall, while crossing a street in Boston. I did not know her until she had scrambled up with much assistance, and recognizing me at once, fastened on my offered arm, saying breathlessly, "I am so glad to see you. I have been wishing to talk to you about Sarah Winnemucca. Now Sarah Winnemucca" - and she went on discoursing as peacefully about a maligned Indian prot6g6e as if she were strolling in some sequestered moonlit lane, on a summer evening. I have said that the influence wrought upon me by Brookline life was largely due to one man and one or two writers. The writer who took possession of me, after Emerson, was the German author, Jean Paul Richter, whose me moirs had just been written by a Brookline lady, Mrs. Thomas Lee. This biography set before me, just at the right time, the attrac tions of purely literary life, carried on in a perfectly unworldly spirit; and his story of "Siebenkas," just then opportunely translated, presented the same thing in a more graphic way. From that moment poverty, or at least 88 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

extreme economy, had no terrors for me, and I could not bear the thought of devoting my life to the technicalities of Blackstone. Not that the law-book had failed to interest me, - for it was a book, - but I could not consent to sur render my life to what it represented, nor have I ever repented that decision. I felt instinc tively what the late Dwight Foster said to me long after: "The objection to the study of the law is not that it is not interesting, - for it is eminently so, - but that it fills your mind with knowledge which cannot be carried into another stage of existence." Long after this, more over, my classmate Durant, at the height of his professional success, once stoutly denied to me that there was any real interest to be found in legal study. "The law," he said, "is sim ply a system of fossilized injustice; there is not enough of intellectual interest about it to occupy an intelligent mind for an hour." This I do not believe; and he was probably not the highest authority; yet his remark and Judge Foster's always helped me to justify to myself that early choice. With all this social and intellectual occupa tion, much of my Brookline life was lonely and meditative; my German romances made me a dreamer, and I spent much time in the woods, nominally botanizing but in reality try THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 89

ing to adjust myself, being still only nineteen or twenty, to the problems of life. One favor ite place was Hammond's Pond, then cele brated among botanists as the only locality for the beautiful Andromeda pohfolia, so named by Linn~eus because, like the fabled Andromeda, it dwelt in wild regions only. The pond was, and I believe still is, surrounded by deep woods and overhung by a hill covered with moss - grown fragments of rock, among which the pink Cy prz~edium or lady's slipper used to grow pro fusely. The Andromeda was on the other side of the lake, and some one had left a leaky boat there, which I used to borrow and paddle across the dark water, past a cedar forest which lined it on one side, and made me associate it with the gloomy Mummelsee of one of my beloved German ballads by August Schnezler "Amid the gloomy Mummelsee Do live the palest lilies many. All day they droop so drowsily In azure air or rainy, But when the dreadful moon of night Rains down on earth its yellow light, Up spring they, full of lightness, In woman's form and brightness."

My lilies were as pale and as abundant as any German lake could ever boast; and among them there was to be seen motionless the black prow of some old boat which had sunk at its 90 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

moorings and looked so uncanny that T never would row near it. Above the lake a faint path wound up the hill among the rocks, and at the summit there was a large detached boul der with a mouldering ladder reaching its top, where I used to climb and rest after my long rambling. Close by there was one dead pine tree of the older growth towering above the younger trees; and sometimes a homeward faring robin or crow would perch and rest there as I was resting, or the sweet bell of the Newton Theological Seminary on its isolated hill would peal out what seemed like the An gelus. What with all these dreamings, and the in fluence of Jean Paul and Heine, the desire for a free life of study, and perhaps of dreams, grew so strong upon me that I decided to go back to Cambridge as "resident graduate," there was then no graduate school, - and es tablish myself as cheaply as possible, to live after my own will. I was already engaged to be married to one of the Brookline cousins, but I had taken what my mother called "the vow of poverty," and was willing to risk the future. Mrs. Farrar, an old friend of the family, with whom I had spent a part of the summer before entering college, reported with satisfaction that she had met me one day driving my own small THE PERIOD OF THE NEWNESS 91

wagon-load of furniture over muddy roads from Brookline to Cambridge, like any emigrant lad, whereas the last time she had seen me before was at the opera in Boston, with soiled white kid gloves on. Never was I happier in my life than at that moment of transformation when she saw me. It was my Flight into Egypt. I established myself in the cheapest room I could find, in a house then called "College House," and standing on part of the ground now occupied by the block of that name. Its familiar appellation in Cambridge was "The Old Den," and my only housemate at first was an eccentric law student, or embryo lawyer, popularly known as "Light-House Thomas," because he had fitted himself for college in one of those edifices. Here at last I could live in my own way, making both ends meet by an occasional pupil, and enjoying the same free dom which Thoreau, then unknown to me, was afterwards to possess in his hut. I did not know exactly what I wished to study in Cambridge; indeed, I went there to find out. Perhaps I had some vague notion of prepar ing myself for a professorship in literature or mathematics and metaphysics, but in the mean time I read, as Emerson says of Margaret Fuller, "at a rate like Gibbon's." There was the obstacle to be faced, which has indeed 92 CHEERFUL YESTERDAYS

always proved too much for me, - the enor mous wealth of the world of knowledge, and the stupendous variety of that which I wished to know. Doubtless the modern elective sys tem, or even a wise teacher, would have helped me; they would have compelled me to con centration, but perhaps I may have absolutely needed some such period of intellectual wild oats. This was in September, 1843. I read in that year, and a subsequent similar year, the most desultory and disconnected books, the larger the better: Newton's "Principia" and Whewell's "Mechanical Euclid;" Ritter's "His tory of Ancient Philosophy;" Sismondi's "De cline and Fall of the Roman Empire;" Lamen nais' "Paroles d'un Croyant" and "Livre du Peuple;" Homer and Hesiod; Linnzeus's "Cor respondence;" Emerson over and over. Fortu nately I kept up outdoor life also and learned the point where books and nature meet; learned that Chaucer belongs to spring, German ro mance to summer nights, Amadis de Gaul and the Morte d'Arthur to the Christmas time; and found that books of natural history, in Tho reau's phrase, "furnish the cheerfulest winter reading." Bettine Brentano and Giinderode