Children's Stories in American Literature, 1660-1860 Part 4

In an old New England farm-house kitchen, a barefoot boy, dressed in homespun, one day sat listening to a lazy Scotch beggar who piped the songs of Burns in return for his meal of bread and cheese and cider.

The beggar was good-natured, and the boy was an eager listener, and _Bonnie Doon_, _Highland Mary_, and _Auld Lang Syne_ were trilled forth as the master himself may have sung them among the Scottish "banks and braes." Never before had the farmer boy heard of the famous peasant, and a new door was opened through which he pa.s.sed into an undreamed of world. A few months later the school-master gave him a copy of Burns's poems, and with this gift the boy became a poet himself. For these songs of roadsides and meadows, of ploughed fields and wet hedgerows, were to him familiar pictures of every-day life, whose poetry, once revealed, had to express itself in words.

The boy was the son of John and Abigail Whittier, Quaker farmers owning a little homestead in the valley of the Merrimac, near the town of Haverhill, Ma.s.s. In honor of an ancestor he had been named John Greenleaf Whittier, the Greenleaf, as he tells us in one of his poems, having become Americanized from the French _feuille verte_, _green leaf_, a suggestion, perhaps, of far away days in which the family might have been men of the wood, keepers of the deer or forest guarders in France during feudal ages. In his boyhood, life in the Merrimac valley was primitive enough. The house was small and plain, the kitchen being the living room, and the parlor dedicated to Sunday and holiday use only. The floor was sanded and on the wide fire-place benches the men and children of the family sat at night to whittle axe-handles, mend shoes, crack nuts, or learn the next day's lessons.

Often a stranger was found among them; some Quaker travelling on business, or a stranger on his way to some distant town, or perhaps a professional beggar to whom the hospitality of the place was well known. Once when the mother had refused a night's shelter to an unprepossessing vagabond, John was sent out to bring him back. He proved to be an Italian artisan, and after supper he told them of the Italian grape gatherings and festivals, and of the wonderful beauty of Italy, paying for his entertainment by presenting to the mother a recipe for making bread from chestnuts.

Sometimes the visitor would be an uncanny old crone who still believed in witches and fairies, and who told how her b.u.t.ter refused to come, or how her candle had been snuffed out by a witch in the form of a big black bug. One old woman in the neighborhood was renowned for her tales of ghosts, devils, fairies, brownies, sprenties, enchanted towers, headless men, haunted mills that were run at night by ghostly millers and witches riding on broom-sticks by the light of the full moon, and descending unguarded chimneys to lay their spells upon cream-pot and yeast-bowl.

After such an evening's entertainment the boy needed courage to leave the bright kitchen fire and climb up the narrow stairs to the loft where he slept, and where the sound of the night-wind crept through the frosty rafters, and the voice of the screech-owl came dismally from the trees outside.

Haverhill boasted at that time its village conjurer, who could remove the spells of those wicked spirits, and whose gaunt form could be seen any day along the meadows and streams gathering herbs to be stewed and brewed into love-potions, cures for melancholy, spells against witchcraft, and other remedies for human ills. He was held in great respect by the inhabitants, and feared almost as much as the witches themselves.

An ever-welcome guest at the Whittiers was the school-master, whose head was full of the local legends, and whose tales of Indian raids and of revolutionary struggles were regarded as authentic history.

This Yankee pedagogue, moreover, could, with infinite spirit and zest, retell the cla.s.sic stories of the Greek and Latin poets.

Twice a year came to the little homestead the Yankee pedler, with his supply of pins, needles, thread, razors, soaps, and scissors for the elders, and jack-knives for the boys who had been saving their pennies to purchase those treasures. He had gay ribbons for worldly minded maids, but these were never bought for Quaker Whittier's daughters.

But to Poet John's thinking the pedler's choicest wares were the songs of his own composing, printed with wood-cuts, which he sold at an astonishingly low price, or even, upon occasions, gave away. These songs celebrated earthquakes, fires, shipwrecks, hangings, marriages, deaths, and funerals. Often they were improvised as the pedler sat with the rest around the hearth fire. If a wedding had occurred during his absence he was ready to versify it, and equally ready to lament the loss of a favorite cow. To Whittier this gift of rhyming seemed marvellous, and in after years he described this wandering minstrel as encircled, to his young eyes, with the very nimbus of immortality.

Such was the home-life of this barefooted boy, who drove the cows night and morning through the dewy meadows, and followed the oxen, breaking the earth into rich brown furrows, whose sight and smell suggested to him always the generous bounty of nature. From early spring, when the corn was planted in fields bordered by wild rose-bushes, to late autumn, when the crop lay bound into glistening sheaves, his life was one of steady toil, lightened sometimes by a day's fishing in the mountain streams or by a berrying excursion up among the hills.

In cold weather he went to school in the little school-house that he celebrates in one of his poems, and very often, as he confessed, he was found writing verses instead of doing sums on his slate.

This old phase of New-England life has now pa.s.sed away, but he has preserved its memory in three poems, which are in a special sense biographical. These poems are, _The Barefoot Boy_, _My Schoolmaster_, and _Snow-Bound_. The first two are simple, boyish memories, but the last is a description not only of his early home, but of the New-England farm life, and is a Puritan idyl.

All are full of the idealization of childhood, for the poet could never break loose from the charm which had enthralled him as a boy.

The poetry of common life which lay over the meadow lands and fields of grain, which gave a voice to the woodland brook, and glorified the falling rain and snow, was felt by Whittier, when, as a child, he paused from his work to listen to the robin's song among the wheat or watch the flocks of clouds making their way across the summer sky.

When he was nineteen years of age the country-side mail-carrier one day rode up to the farm and took from his saddle-bags the weekly paper, which he tossed to the boy, who stood mending a fence. With trembling eagerness Whittier opened it, and saw in the "Poet's Corner"

his first printed poem. He had sent it with little hope that it would be accepted, and the sight of it filled him with joy, and determined his literary career. A few months later the editor of the paper, William Lloyd Garrison, drove out to the homestead to see the young verse-maker. Whittier was called from the field where he was hoeing, and in the interview that followed Garrison insisted that such talent should not be thrown away, and urged the youth to take a course of study at some academy. But, although the farm supplied the daily needs of the family, money was scarce, and the sum required for board and tuition was impossible to sc.r.a.pe together. A young farm a.s.sistant, however, offered to teach Whittier the trade of shoemaking, and his every moment of leisure was thereafter spent in learning this craft.

During the following winter the lad furnished the women of the neighborhood with good, well-made shoes, and with the money thus earned he entered Haverhill Academy in April, 1827, being then in his twentieth year. For the next six months his favorite haunts in field and wood were unvisited, except on the Sat.u.r.days and Sundays spent with his family. He gained some reputation as a poet by the publication of the ode which he wrote in honor of the new academy, and although he returned to the farm after six months of study, it was only to earn more money for further schooling.

His poems and sketches now began to appear in the different newspapers and periodicals, and he did some editing for various papers. This work brought him into notice among literary people, but it was his political convictions that first gave him a national reputation.

From the first Whittier stood side by side with William Lloyd Garrison in his crusade against slavery, and many of his best poems appeared in the _Liberator_, Garrison's own paper. These poems, with others, were collected in a volume called _Voices of Freedom_. It was these songs, which rushed onward like his own mountain brooks, that made Whittier known from one end of the country to the other as an apostle of liberty. All Whittier's poems of this period belong to the political history of the country, of which they are as much a part as the war records.

In all this work there is no trace of bitterness or enmity. His songs of freedom were but the bugle-notes calling the nation to a higher humanity. Like the old Hebrew prophets, he spared not his own, and many of his most burning words are a summons to duty to his brothers in the North. If he could remind the South that the breath of slavery tainted the air

"That old Dekalb and Sumter drank,"

he could also, in _Barbara Frietchie_, pay loving tribute to the n.o.ble heart of one of her best-loved sons. His was the dream of the great nation to be--his spirit that of the preacher who saw his people unfaithful to the high trust they had received as guardians of the land which the world had been taught to regard as the home of liberty.

It was this high conception that gave to his work its greatest power, and that made Whittier, above all others, the poet of freedom; so that although the mission of these poems has ceased, and as literature they will not appeal to succeeding generations as forcibly as they did to their own, as a part of national history they will be long preserved.

Whittier's other poems deal so largely with the home-life of his day that he is called the poet of New England. All its traditions, memories, and beliefs are faithfully recorded by him. In _Snow-Bound_ we have the life of the New-England farmer. In _Mabel Martin_ we see again the old Puritan dogmatism hunting down witches, burning or hanging them, and following with relentless persecution the families of the unhappy wretches who thus came under the ban. In _Mogg Megone_ is celebrated in beautiful verse one of those legends of Indian life which linger immortally around the pines of New England, while the _Grave by the Lake_, the _Changeling_, the _Wreck of Rivermouth_, the _Dead Ship of Harpswell_, and others in the collection called the _Tent on the Beach_, revive old traditions of those early days when history mingled with legend and the belief in water-spirits and ghostly warnings had not yet vanished.

In some exquisite ballads, such as _School Days_, we have the memory of the past, fresh as the wild violets which the poet culled as a boy, while _Maud Muller_ is a very idyl of a New-England harvest-field in the poet's youth. In _Among the Hills_ we have some of Whittier's best poems of country life, while many minor poems celebrate the hills and streams of which he was so fond. Whittier wrote, also, many beautiful hymns, and his poems for children, such as _King Solomon and the Ants_ and _The Robin_, show how easy it was for his great heart to enter into the spirit of childhood. _Child Life_, his compilation of poems for childhood, is one of the best ever made, while another compilation, called _Songs of Three Centuries_, shows his wide familiarity and appreciation of all that is great in English poetry.

After the sale of the old home of his childhood Whittier lived in the house at Amesbury, which for many years his sister shared. His last collection of poems, called _Sundown_, was published in 1890, for some friends only, as a memento of his eightieth birthday. He died two years later, and was buried in the yard of the Friends' meeting-house in Amesbury, a short distance from his birthplace.

CHAPTER VIII

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

1804-1864

In 1804 the town of Salem, in Ma.s.sachusetts, was the most important seaport in America. With the regularity of the tides its ships sailed to China, the East Indies, the Feejee Islands, South America, and the West Indies, and its seamen were as well known in the harbors of these distant places as in their native town. Throughout the Revolution Salem, with some neighboring smaller ports, was the hope of the colonists. No American navy existed; but the merchants and marines turned their vessels into ships of war, and under the name of privateers swept the seas of British cruisers, capturing in six years over four hundred and fifty prizes. During the war of 1812, again, the naval service was led by the hardy Salem captains, and the brave little seaport gave generously to the cause of the nation. Salem from the first was identified with American independence. Upon her hillsides one memorable day the inhabitants gathered to watch the fight between the Chesapeake and the Shannon, and through her streets, a few weeks later, the body of the heroic Lawrence was borne in state. Among the thronging crowds that day must have wandered the boy Nathaniel Hawthorne, then in his tenth year. Born in Salem, he came of a line of seafaring men who had fought their way to fame and fortune in the teeth of wind and wave; his family having its American beginning at the time when Indian and white man alike made their homes in the shadowy aisles of the New-England forests. These ocean-roving ancestors were among the first to take an American ship to St.

Petersburg, Sumatra, Australia, and Africa. They fought pirates, overcame savages, suffered shipwreck and disaster, and many of them found their graves in the waters of some foreign sea. Hawthorne's own father was lost on a voyage.

From this race of hardy sailors Hawthorne inherited the patience, courage, and endurance which were the basis of his character, a character touched besides by that melancholy and love of solitude which is apt to distinguish those born by the sea. It is this combination, perhaps, of Puritan steadfastness of purpose and wild adventurous life that descended to Hawthorne in the form of the most exquisite imagination tinctured with the highest moral aspirations.

It was the st.u.r.dy, healthy plant of Puritanism blossoming into a beautiful flower.

In this old town of Salem, with its quaint houses, with their carved doorways and many windows, with its pretty rose-gardens, its beautiful overshadowing elms, its dingy court-house and celebrated town-pump, Hawthorne pa.s.sed his early life, his picturesque surroundings forming a suitable environment for the handsome, imaginative boy who was to create the most beautiful literary art that America had yet known.

Behind the town stood old Witch Hill, grim and ghastly with memories of the witches hanged there in colonial times. In front spread the sea, a golden argosy of promise, whose wharves and warehouses held priceless stores of merchandise. Between this haunting spirit of the past and the broader, newer life of the future, Hawthorne walked with the serene hope of the youth of that day. The old, intolerant Puritanism had pa.s.sed away. Only the fine gold remained as the priceless treasure of the new generation.

Hawthorne's boyhood was much like that of any other boy in Salem town.

He went to school and to church, loved the sea and prophesied that he should go away on it some day and never return, was fond of reading, and ready to fight with any school-fellows who had, as he expressed it, "a quarrelsome disposition." He was a healthy, robust lad, finding life a good thing whether he was roaming the streets, sitting idly on the wharves, or stretched on the floor at home reading a favorite author.

Almost all boys who have become writers have liked the same books, and Hawthorne, like his fellows, lived in the magic world of Shakespeare and Milton, Spenser, Froissart, and Bunyan. _The Pilgrim's Progress_ was an especial favorite with him, its lofty spirit carrying his soul into those spiritual regions which the child mind reverences without understanding. For one year of his boyhood he was supremely happy in the wild regions of Sebago Lake, Me., where the family lived for a time. Here, he says, he led the life of a bird of the air, with no restraint and in absolute freedom. In the summer he would take his gun and spend days in the forest, doing whatever pleased his vagabond spirit at the moment. In the winter he would follow the hunters through the snow, or skate till midnight alone upon the frozen lake with only the shadows of the hills to keep him company, and sometimes pa.s.s the remainder of the night in a solitary log cabin, warmed by the blaze of the fallen evergreens.

But he had to return to Salem to prepare for college, whither he went in 1821, in his seventeenth year. He entered Bowdoin, and had among his fellow-students Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the United States. Here Hawthorne spent happy days, and long afterward, in writing to an old college friend, he speaks of the charm that lingers around the memory of the place when he gathered blueberries in study hours, watched the great logs drifting down the current of the Androscoggin from the lumber districts above, fished in the forest streams, and shot pigeons and squirrels in hours which should have been devoted to the cla.s.sics.

In this same letter, which forms the dedication to one of his books, he adds that it is this friend, if any one, who is responsible for his becoming a writer, as it was here, in the shadow of the tall pines which sheltered Bowdoin College, that the first prophecy concerning his destiny was made. He was to be a writer of fiction, the friend said, little dreaming of the honors that were to crown one of the great novelists of the world.

After leaving Bowdoin Hawthorne returned to Salem, where he pa.s.sed the next twelve years of his life. Here he produced, from time to time, stories and sketches which found their way to the periodicals and won for him a narrow reputation. But the years which a man usually devotes to his best work were spent by Hawthorne in a contented half-dream of a great future, for good as is some of the work produced at this time, it never would have won for the author the highest place in American literature. These stories and sketches were afterward collected and published under the t.i.tle _Twice-Told Tales_ and _The Snow Image_.

Full of the grace and beauty of Hawthorne's style, they were the best imaginative work yet produced in America, but in speaking of them Hawthorne himself says that in this result of twelve years there is little to show for its thought and industry.

But the promise of his genius was fulfilled at last. In 1850, when Hawthorne was forty-six years old, appeared his first great romance.

Hawthorne had chosen for his subject a picture of Puritan times in New England, and out of the tarnished records of the past he created a work of art of marvellous and imperishable beauty. In the days of which he wrote, a Puritan town was exactly like a large family bound together by mutual interests, the acts of each life being regarded as affecting the whole community. Hawthorne has preserved this spirit of colonial New England, with all its struggles, hopes, and fears, and the conscience-driven Puritan, who lived in the new generation only in public records and church histories, was given new life. In Hawthorne's day this grim figure, stalking in the midst of Indian fights, village pillories, town-meetings, witch-burnings, and church-councils was already a memory. With his steeple-crowned hat and his matchlock at his side he had left the pleasant New-England farm lands and was found only in the court-houses, where his deeds were recorded. Hawthorne brought him back from the past, set him in the midst of his fellow-elders in the church, and showed him a sufferer for conscience' sake.

This first romance, published under the t.i.tle _The Scarlet Letter_, revealed to Hawthorne himself, as well as to the world outside, the transcendent power of his genius. Hawthorne, who was despondent of the little popularity of his other books, told the publisher who saw the first sketch of _The Scarlet Letter_, that he did not know whether the story was very good or very bad. The publisher, however, at once perceived its worth and brought it out one year from that time, and the public saw that it had been entertaining a genius unawares.

Hawthorne's next book, _The House of the Seven Gables_, is a story of the New England of his own day. A clever critic has called it an impression of a summer afternoon in an elm-shadowed New-England town.

Through its pages flit quaint contrasting figures that one might find in New England and nowhere else. The old spinster of ancient family, obliged to open a toy and gingerbread shop, but never forgetting the time when the house with seven gables was a mansion of limitless hospitality, is a pathetic picture of disappointed hope and broken-down fortune. So is her brother, who was falsely imprisoned for twenty years, and who in his old age must lean upon his sister for support; and the other characters are equally true to the life that has almost disappeared in the changes of the half-century since its scenes were made the inspiration of Hawthorne's romance.

_The House of the Seven Gables_ was followed by two beautiful volumes for children, _The Wonder Book_ and _Tanglewood Tales_. In _The Wonder Book_ Hawthorne writes as if he were a child himself, so simple is the charm that he weaves around these old, old tales. Not content with the Greek myths, he created little incidents and impossible characters that glance in and out with elfin grace. One feels that these were the very stories that were told by the centaurs, fauns, and satyrs themselves in the shadows of the old Attic forests. Here we learn that King Midas not only had his palace turned to gold, but that his own little daughter, Marigold, a fancy of Hawthorne's own, was also converted into the same shining metal. We learn, too, the secrets of many a hero and G.o.d of this realm of fancy which had been unsuspected by any other historian of their deeds. Every child who reads _The Wonder Book_ doubts not that Hawthorne had hobn.o.bbed many a moonlit night with Pan and Bacchus in their vine-covered grottos by the riverside. This dainty, ethereal touch appears in all his work for children.

A like quality gives distinction to his fourth great novel, which deals with a man supposed to be a descendant of the old fauns. This creation, named Donatello, from his resemblance to the celebrated statue of the Marble Faun, is not wholly human, although he has human interests and feeling. Hawthorne makes Donatello ashamed of his pointed ears, though his spirit is as wild and untamed as that of his rude ancestors. In this book there is a description of a scene where Count Donatello joins in a peasant dance around a public fountain. And so vividly is his half-human nature here brought out that Hawthorne seems to have witnessed somewhere the mad revels of the veritable fauns and satyrs in the days of their life upon the earth. Throughout this story Hawthorne shows the same subtle sympathy with uncommon natures, the mystery of such souls having the same fascination for him that the secrets of the earth and air have for the scientist and philosopher.

The book coming between _The House of the Seven Gables_ and _The Marble Faun_ is called _The Blithedale Romance_. It is in part the record of a period of Hawthorne's life when he joined a community which hoped to improve the world by combining healthy manual labor with intellectual pursuits, and proving that self-interest and all differences in rank must be hurtful to the commonwealth. This little society lived in a suburb of Boston, and called their a.s.sociation Brook Farm. Each member performed daily some manual labor on the farm or in the house, hours being set aside for study. Here Hawthorne ploughed the fields and joined in the amus.e.m.e.nts, or sat apart while the rest talked about art and literature, danced, sang, or read Shakespeare aloud. Some of the cleverest men and women of New England joined this community, the rules of which obliged the men to wear plaid blouses and rough straw hats, and the women to content themselves with plain calico gowns.

These serious-minded men and women, who tried to solve a great problem by leading the lives of Arcadian shepherds, at length dispersed, each one going back to the world and working on as bravely as if the experiment had been a great success. The experiences of Brook Farm were shadowed forth in _The Blithedale Romance_, although it was not a literal narrative.

Immediately after this Hawthorne was married and went to live in Concord, near Boston, in a quaint old dwelling called The Manse. And as all his work partakes of the personal flavor of his own life, so his existence here is recorded in a delightful series of essays called _Mosses from an Old Manse_. Here we have a description of the old house itself, and of the author's family life, of the kitchen-garden and apple-orchards, of the meadows and woods, and of his friendship with that lover of nature, Henry Th.o.r.eau, whose writings form a valuable contribution to American literature. The _Mosses from an Old Manse_ must ever be famous as the history of the quiet hours of one of the greatest American men of letters. They are full of Hawthorne's own personality, and reveal more than any other of his books the depth and purity of his poetic and rarely gifted nature.

In 1853 his old friend and schoolmate, President Pierce, appointed Hawthorne American Consul at Liverpool. He remained abroad seven years, spending the last four on the Continent, some transcriptions of his experience being found in the celebrated _Marble Faun_ and in several volumes of _Note-Books_. _The Marble Faun_, published in Europe under the t.i.tle _Transformation_, was written in Rome, and was partly suggested to Hawthorne by an old villa which he occupied near Florence. This old villa possessed a moss-covered tower, "haunted," as Hawthorne said in a letter to a friend, "by owls and by the ghost of a monk who was confined there in the thirteenth century previous to being burnt at the stake in the princ.i.p.al square in Florence." He also states in the same letter that he meant to put the old castle bodily in a romance that was then in his head, which he did by making the villa the old family castle of Donatello, although the scene of the story is laid in Rome.