Literary New York Part 4

Chapter VI

With Paulding, Drake, and Halleck

In the summer of 1797, a tall, well-built lad with a face showing just a suggestion of melancholy, landed from the weekly market sloop and walked along the streets of New York for the first time. He was a country boy, well versed in trees and brooks and used to pathless hills and rough country roads, and his first impression of New York was that the dwellers there were great lumpkins. He could not imagine why they pointed at him and nodded at him and laughed as he walked in the middle of the street, quite disregarding the paved walk. He stopped, from time to time, to ask his way, until he came to a little square brick house in Vesey Street, below Church, bearing the number 43, the home of William Irving. There he went in and was given a good hug by Mrs. Irving. The boy was James Kirke Paulding, and she who welcomed him was his sister, with whom he was to live until he should get a start in the ways and work of the city.

William Irving lived in a house delightfully situated, though no one would think so now when the spot is jammed with merchants' warehouses, and sounds of trade fill the air. When Paulding came to town, it was beyond the ken of the business section, and there were not so many houses about but that he could enjoy an inviting view. From the front door he looked straight before him over the grounds of Columbia College, and to the left across green gardens to the river. From his little window in the upper story he saw the city to the south, and to the east St. Paul's Chapel, with the steeple that came to be so gray with age looking then so new, for it had just been added to the church. Beyond the graveyard and across Broadway, he had a good view of the park with its three buildings--the Bridewell, the Almshouse, and the Prison,--and across the park could see the Park Theatre and the Brick Church. He could catch a glimpse of Broadway winding over a hill toward the Stone Bridge at Ca.n.a.l Street, and other roads leading into the country towards the north, where level stretches led past rude farmhouses and quaint inns.

The first few years of Paulding in the city, when he was clerk in the United States Loan Office, were years of hard work. But there were relaxations, too, for his relationship to William Irving brought him in contact with the other members of the family--young Washington Irving and Dr. Peter Irving. When, in a few years, Dr. Irving published his newspaper, the _Morning Chronicle_, Paulding wrote bits of prose and verse for it. So his first writings appeared in the same publication and at the same time as the first writings of Washington Irving, and it was the interchange of thought in the Vesey Street house and the opportunities afforded by the _Morning Chronicle_ that led Paulding's thoughts towards writing as a profession.

Meantime there was much going on in the way of improvement. The new City Hall was erected in the park; the first free schoolhouse was opened; and Fulton's _Clermont_ sailed up the Hudson, the first successful steamboat. A commission had been appointed, too, with the object of directing the course of the streets, which up to that time had grown out of the paths left by the cows in their wanderings to pasture. The commissioners did their work so that, as time went on, the highways were laid out to form a city of strict right angles. The cows certainly did their part in a manner that left far more picturesque twists and turns than were to be found in the upper part laid out by the commissioners in such a scientifically uninteresting way.

Paulding lived with William Irving in the Vesey Street house for nine years, and then the Irvings moved a few blocks the other side of Columbia College, to 287 Greenwich Street, and Paulding went with them. Here began the meetings of a literary set, which in a few months developed into the "Ancient Club of New York," with Washington, Peter, and William Irving, Paulding, Henry Brevoort, and Gouverneur Kemble leading members. Kemble owned some land in New Jersey, on which was located _Salmagundi's_ c.o.c.kloft Hall, and on this account was called "The Patroon." From one of the informal meetings of the Ancient Club, Washington Irving, his brother William, and Paulding went secretly to Irving's house in Ann Street to discuss details of _Salmagundi_.

Paulding wrote his share of _Salmagundi_ on the upper floor of the Greenwich Street house, while the lower floor was the mill of Pindar c.o.c.kloft, conducted by William Irving.

From this house on many an evening the friends went to dine at Dyde's, the fascinating eating-house near the Park Theatre, then beginning a long career with the founders of _Salmagundi_ as a foundation for the memories that were to cl.u.s.ter around its doors, to be pa.s.sed over, years later, to Windust's still more famous resort on almost the same spot.

Paulding was still living with the Irving family when, in 1807, they went to live at No. 17 in aristocratic State Street, at the corner of Pearl, facing the Battery Park. Here, overlooking the blue waters of the bay dotted with sailboats and rowboats, and beyond to the stretches of Jersey sh.o.r.e, Paulding wrote his contributions to the _a.n.a.lectic Magazine_, edited by Washington Irving from his home little more than a stone's throw away across the Bowling Green; also, _The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan_. Here, too, replying to an attack on his country, he wrote, _The United States and England_, a pamphlet that attracted the notice of President Madison, who summoned Paulding to Washington for eight years as Secretary of the Board of Navy Commissioners. During those eight years he wrote _The Backwoodsman_ his longest poem and the one which he liked best of all, a liking not generally shared by his readers; the second series of _Salmagundi_; and _Koningsmarke_.

Having married Gertrude, the sister of his friend and companion Gouverneur Kemble, his days were moving smoothly along when the death of his wife's father took him again to New York and he went to live in what had long been the home of "The Patroon." This was a mansion of solid type in Whitehall Street, corner of Stone, set in the midst of a wide-spreading garden, a site blurred out in later days by the Produce Exchange. Here he lived during the fourteen years he acted as Navy Agent at New York, devoting his evenings to literary work, writing his most successful book, _The Dutchman's Fireside_, also _John Bull in America_, _Tales of the Good Woman_, and _Westward Ho!_ In the evening he went often to the Park Theatre, and came to know James H. Hackett, the greatest Falstaff America had seen, writing for him _The Lion of the West_, which Hackett acted for many years. And then after fifteen years in this house he left it, and with his family went to Washington as Secretary of the Navy.

Once more, in 1841, he returned to New York, to live in Beach Street, then the fashionable St. John's Park neighborhood. But, his wife dying before he was really settled, he soon left New York and pa.s.sed the last days of his life in Dutchess County, the region of his birth.

At about the time Paulding moved into the State Street house two young men met one afternoon at the home of a mutual friend. One was studying medicine and beginning to see something more in life than a struggle for mere existence. He was Joseph Rodman Drake. The other, Fitz-Greene Halleck, was a bookkeeper and had but just come from his birthplace in Guilford, Connecticut. He had read much poetry and had written some stray verse. A few days after their meeting, the two came together again in the rooms where Halleck boarded in Greenwich Street, not half a dozen houses from the place where Washington Irving was living with Mrs. Brandish. The second meeting was the real start of an inseparable friendship which has caused them to be looked upon as the Orestes and Pylades of American poets.

Halleck had begun his work for Jacob Barker. The warehouse where he was employed stands yet and can easily be found by walking down John Street to Burling Slip, and so on around the corner into South Street by the waterside. Drake ofttimes took that walk and sat there by the side of his friend's desk. Often, too, in the late afternoon, Halleck walked from there to the green that since has been called the City Hall Park, and sat until Drake came from his studies in the nearby College of Physicians and Surgeons. The college was part of Columbia, which lay to the west of the green. In time the city overgrew the college grounds so completely that those interested in remembering where they had been set up a tablet at West Broadway and Murray Street, as a reminder that they should not be entirely forgotten. From the park it was the wont of the youthful poets to walk along Broadway below Trinity Church--then the fashionable promenade,--and so on to the Battery, past where Irving had lived by the Bowling Green, past where Paulding was then living.

The time came when Drake was graduated, and then there were the long evenings together back of his office in the store numbered 121 Bowery, just above Hester Street. From this house the friends made their long excursions across the Harlem River, far beyond the town, into the romantic Bronx of which Drake sang so often and so well.

One night, starting from the Bowery shop, Drake took Halleck down Broadway into Thames Street, and there, back of the City Hotel, dined him in a dingy little public house, the first of many pleasant evenings there. It was the ale-house kept by William Reynolds, a genial, red-faced man who had been a grave-digger in the nearby Trinity Churchyard.

The tavern remained a place of entertainment for close upon a hundred years, most of the time known as "Old Tom's," from Reynolds's successor. It came to be a landmark for the curious, but as the curious always stood outside and never by any chance went in to buy of what was on sale there, it went the way of all old places. To-day, if you turn into Thames Street, from busy Broadway, you come upon a ma.s.s of buildings in perpetual shade, and with a decidedly provincial air not at all in keeping with the up-to-date city. A walk of half a block brings you to Temple Street--a thoroughfare leading nowhere in particular, but which wise chroniclers have quarrelled over, some urging that it came by its name because of being close by Trinity Church, which is a temple of worship, and others quite as vigorously contending that it took its name from Charlotte Temple, who lived nearby. Here you find Reynolds's tavern metamorphosed into a modern place of business, and though the street is still quaint-appearing, every suggestion of romance has vanished from the tavern. Nevertheless the curious, who in its days of need regarded it from afar, love to sit in it, surrounded by modern conveniences, and tell what it was like "in Drake's time."

Drake prospered, and after a time set up his pharmacy in the busiest part of town, that later grew to be the core of Newspaper Row. When Drake lived in Park Row, the second door from Beekman Street, he and Halleck hit upon the idea of the "Croaker Papers," a series of satires in verse, printed in the _Evening Post_, in which the poets sailed into the public characters of the day. This was the house where Halleck went to read his _f.a.n.n.y_ to Drake, and made some corrections at his friend's suggestion before he gave it to the world.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Shakespeare Tavern]

Around the corner from the Park Row shop, the Shakespeare Tavern was conducted by Thomas Hawkins Hodgkinson, the actor; a resort for the actors, the artists, the writers, the talkers of the town; a popular rendezvous quite in contrast to Reynolds's quiet inn. It stood at the southwest corner of Fulton and Na.s.sau streets, a double house of brick, having for its sign a bust of the great poet over the door. In after years a tablet was set to mark the spot. Halleck tells of a meeting here with James Lawson, the journalist, who came to write the _Tales and Sketches of a Cosmopolite_.

On a night when Drake and Paulding and some others gathered for a friendly evening there arose a discussion, argued for and against by all the company, as to whether or not the rivers of America were rich enough in legend and romance to lend themselves to poetic treatment.

And after the talk had lengthened into the morning hours, Drake went to the room over his Park Row shop to put his view of the subject into writing. In a few days he read to Halleck the poem on which his fame chiefly rests, _The Culprit Fay_--a poetic fantasy illumining the Highlands of the Hudson.

In the year 1820, Halleck sat in the Park Row house by the bedside of his friend, who was dying of consumption, and here, at the age of twenty-five, Joseph Rodman Drake pa.s.sed away. Halleck followed the coffin to that beautiful spot beyond the Harlem that they both loved so well, and there by the side of the Bronx streamlet the poet Drake was buried. In the depth of his grief Halleck wrote the lines:

Green be the turf above thee, Friend of my better days; None knew thee but to love thee, None named thee but to praise.

And now after more than three quarters of a century the words still murmur their message of friendship and sorrow above Drake's grave. The city has sped on far beyond the little graveyard, and harsh sounds throb where once was only the singing of birds; but the consecrated spot remains, cared for year by year as well as may be in despite of relic-hunting vandals.

Halleck outlived his friend by many long years. He gave up bookkeeping for Jacob Barker, and during eighteen years was the confidential manager of the affairs of John Jacob Astor. But he never failed to regret the comrade of his youth, losing with him much of his inspiration.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Jumel Mansion]

Half an hour's journey from Drake's grave, on the western side of the Harlem River, there stands, at One Hundred and Sixtieth Street and Edgecombe Avenue, a house on a bluff so high above the river that it can be seen from afar--white in the sunlight. This is the Morris house, where Mary Philipse lived after she became the wife of Roger Morris; where Washington had his headquarters; where Madame Jumel lived, and where she married Aaron Burr. To the one who strolls in the footsteps of _litterateurs_ of a bygone day, it is, more than all, the house where Halleck visited, and where he wrote _Marco Bozzaris_.

Although this was his most widely known poem, and though it was written five years after the death of Drake, the memory of his friend was like a fresh sorrow to him while he wrote. During forty odd years from that time he continued the gently courteous, witty talker, the dignified life of each gathering he attended. But, as he knew so well, his Muse was sorely wounded when Drake died, and the fuller poetic life that might have been his was buried on the green slope of the Bronx with his friend.

Chapter VII

Cooper and His Friends

In that cheerless precinct of New York City to which still clings the name St. John's Park, though there has been no park there this half-century,--in Beach Street, a dozen or perhaps twenty steps from Hudson Street, there stands a house that could not fail to attract the attention of an observant pa.s.ser-by. A brick building, its architectural features suggest roomy attractiveness--a condition little sought after in these days when the value of every inch of ground calls for compactness regardless of beauty of appearance. One looking at this building and given to sentiment might argue that it is strongly reminiscent of a human being who had once been vigorous and had made a considerable show in the world of fashion and pride, but who had sunk to poverty and decrepitude. For the carved window-cases are hacked and beaten away, the wrought-iron railings are twisted and rusty, the marble steps are cracked and crumbling, the high ceilings with their heavy and ornate mouldings are seamed and discolored, and the ma.s.sive oaken doors are cracked by many a rusty nail driven into them, holding ragged and worn-out garments. Yet even in its age and neglect are found traces of its primal st.u.r.dy and artistic proportions.

In the year 1821, this house was the home of James Fenimore Cooper.

His first book, _Precaution_, had failed utterly. His second book, _The Spy_, had been prodigiously successful, when in this year he went to New York to live in what was then the fashionable district of St.

John's Park. He was thirty-one years old, had lived at Cooperstown, studied at Yale, shipped as a sailor before the mast, made voyages to England and Spain, been appointed midshipman, and seen service on Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain, had resigned his commission, and had married Augusta de Lancey at Heathcote Hill Manor, Mamaroneck. After the birth of his daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, who became a writer of rural sketches, he settled down in Westchester County to live the life of a country gentleman. He might have remained there all his days but that one day he got hold of a particularly stupid book of English life, and was so bored by it that it forced from him the exclamation that he could write a better himself! Which remark being interpreted literally by his wife, there was nothing for the country gentleman but to make good his boast. So he wrote a dull and stupid story which even his friends had difficulty in reading to the end, and then, doubtless finding writing more agreeable than farming, wrote another that destined him evermore to a literary life.

This much of Cooper's life was behind him when he moved into the Beach Street house. In this home he wrote _The Pioneers_, first of the famous Leatherstocking Tales and, too, _The Pilot_.

In the New York of that day there was one place where he loved to go for a quiet dinner and discussion with the literary friends whom he quickly gathered around him. This was the chief hostelry of the day, the City Hotel, which stood close by where Wall Street runs into Broadway. It was at one of these dinners that he met James A.

Hillhouse, who, though he had already written _The Judgment_ and was recognized as a poet, was then engaged in mercantile pursuits in the city; but was very soon to make a home in New Haven and remain there during the rest of his life. Hillhouse was not a regular diner with Cooper, but he introduced there a friend who became much more regular in his attendance. Samuel Woodworth was even then shouldering aside adversity with intermittent success. It was his habit to walk briskly up from his printing office at the foot of Wall Street, very much in the manner of a man having an imperative appointment. Four years before Cooper came to town, on a very hot summer day, Woodworth had walked in this same eager manner to his house farther up-town in Duane Street, and there, drinking from a pump before his door, had said: "I'd like to have a drink to-day from the old bucket that hung in my father's well." Whereupon his kindly wife hinted that the old bucket of his remembrance would make a good subject for a poem--a hint that within the hour took the form of _The Old Oaken Bucket_, a pastoral poem well remembered and much sung, though many another of his, many an operetta, and even the historical romance, _The Champion of Freedom_, have faded from memory.

At these dinners, when Cooper sat with his friends, Woodworth and Morris held the first discussions of the plans for _The Mirror_, which was started in 1823, but from which the inconstant Woodworth soon retired.

On more than one occasion one of the dinner party was Richard Henry Dana, a founder of the _North American Review_ and the friend of Bryant. The City Hotel was quite convenient for him, for he had made a sort of headquarters in the place of Wiley, the publisher, around the corner in Wall Street by New Street. At that time he issued from Wiley's shop _The Idle Man_, that literary publication which scarcely lived long enough to include his novels, _Tom Thornton_ and _Paul Felton_, and some contributions from Washington Allston and Bryant.

Many a good idea came from the meetings at the City Hotel, but possibly none more felicitous than that of the Bread-and-Cheese Club.

This remained so long in the germ that the realization seemed far off, but finally, in 1824, began the holding of its fortnightly meetings in Washington Hall--afterwards swept away to give place to the Stewart Building at Broadway and Reade Street. The club derived its name from Cooper's conceit of having candidates balloted for with bread and cheese, a bit of bread favoring election and cheese deciding against it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Washington Hall]

As Cooper had in the main originated the club, he was the leading spirit around whom gathered Halleck and Bryant, Percival, Professor Renwick, Dr. J.W. Francis, and all the writers of the day. An enthusiastic member was Philip Hone, who had just retired from business and bought a house at 235 Broadway opposite the park, a site considered a good way up-town for a residence. His diary, which in after years led him to be called the Pepys of America, was commenced in this house, but the greater part was written at his residence of later date, at the southwest corner of Broadway and Great Jones Street.

Gulian C. Verplanck was a member too. At the time he occupied a professorship in the General Theological Seminary. From one of the meetings he walked down Broadway and through Wall Street past the house, near Broad Street, where he was born, discussing with Bryant and Robert C. Sands an early suggestion of the _Talisman_ magazine, which was not to ripen into an accomplished fact for a good three years. On this same walk, too, he took part while Bryant and Sands discussed plans for the _Atlantic Monthly_, which Sands established the next year.

But writers were not the only members of the Bread-and-Cheese Club.

There were scholars and professional men, and often there were statesmen and men of national distinction as guests. But as Cooper was its leading spirit, when he left for his trip abroad the club went to pieces. He started in 1825 on his foreign travels, and at the time of his going was living at 345 Greenwich Street, where he had finished work on _The Last of the Mohicans_.

In the year after his going there was a gala night at the Lafayette Theatre, when _The Spy_ was enacted. The Lafayette was the largest theatre then. Upon its site in West Broadway near Ca.n.a.l Street St.

Alphonsus's Church now stands. To that performance came from up-State Enoch Crosby, who was said to be the original Spy, and when he appeared in a box with some friends the audience gave him a thunderous ovation.

Cooper returned from abroad in 1833, having added _The Prairie_, _The Red Rover_, _The Water Witch_, and _The Bravo_ to his list of published books, and went to live in Bleecker Street, two blocks from Broadway, near Thompson Street. This was a select neighborhood then of pretty, irregular brick dwellings. The house is there yet, but the neighborhood is no longer elegant. Italian merchants, unkempt in appearance, carry on meagre and uncertain kinds of business, and Cooper's old house is so decorated with signs inside and out as to be picturesque only for its dinginess and disorder. Cooper did not live there long, for he soon moved to Broadway at Prince Street, into a house that later gave way to Niblo's Garden, and there he completed work on the volumes covering his stay in Europe, under the t.i.tles _Sketches in Switzerland_ and _Gleanings in Europe_. But he made no very long stay on Broadway, for he moved again, this time to St.

Mark's Place, a few doors from Third Avenue, into an unpretentious brick house of three stories that is there still. There he wrote _Homeward Bound_ and began in earnest that fierce combat with his critics which was to last to the end of his days and leave many a regret that he had not been a more even-tempered man. From this house he went to Cooperstown, which became his final home.