The Last Leaf Part 7

I saw the coffin lowered. Standing just behind Phillips Brooks, I heard for the last time the voice of my boyhood friend reading with tenderness the burial service. One final experience remained for me on that day which I especially treasure. Leaving the cemetery I walked the short distance to the gate of Elmwood, the birthplace and always the home of Lowell. This spot he especially loved, he knew its trees, every one, and the birds and squirrels that came to visit them. I stood at the gate looking toward the old mansion aloof among the woods. I had often stood there and looked toward the house, but now it had a different aspect; usually its doors and windows were tightly closed, but now everything was wide open, the mourners had not returned to the house and at the moment no living being was visible.

The windows and the portal looked out upon the late afternoon, in the dead silence; in the heightened feeling of the moment it seemed to me that the mansion had come to life, that it missed the fine spirit that had so lately flown forth from it, that with lids widely apart and distressful it looked forth into the great s.p.a.cious heavens after a loved soul that had pa.s.sed from it into the world beyond. It was only a dream of my excited fancy, but I shall always think of Elmwood as it was that afternoon.

I am so fortunate as to have a close a.s.sociation with the town of Concord. My first American ancestor, landing from his ship in 1635, went thither with the earliest settlers and established himself on the level at the west of the town, at that time I suppose the outmost Anglo-Saxon frontier of the Western continent. Seven generations of his descendants have lived in the town. I am in the eighth, and, though not native, and only transiently resident, I have a love for it and it is a town worth loving. It is fair by nature, pleasant hills rising among green levels and the placid river creeping toward the sea. It still maintains its vigorous town-meeting and holds well to the ancient traditions. The thirteen colonies made on its soil their first forcible resistance to British aggression and there is no village in America so a.s.sociated with great men of letters. When a boy of ten in 1844 I was swapped with a cousin, he going for a year to western New York, while I went for a year to the house of my aunt in Concord, the ancient homestead out of which eighty years before my great-grandfather had gone with gun in hand to take his part with the Minute Men. Emerson had just become famous through _Nature_, Th.o.r.eau was then a young man quite unknown to fame. The Alcotts the year before had lived next door to my aunt, Louisa, a child of twelve, and her sisters the "Little Women" whom the world now knows so well.

Close to the Battle Ground stood the two tall gate-posts behind which lay the "Old Manse" whose "Mosses" Hawthorne was just then preserving for immortality. With all these I then, or a little later, came into touch and I can tell how the figures looked as scanned by the eyes of a boy.

Th.o.r.eau in those days was known in the town as an irregular, eccentric spirit, rather hopeless for any practical purpose. He could make a good lead-pencil but having mastered the art he dropped it, preferring to lead a vagabond life, loitering on the river and in the woods, rather to the disquietude of the community, though he had a comfortable home cared for by his good mother and sister. He housed himself in a wigwam at Walden Pond and was suspected of having started from the brands of his camp a forest fire which had spread far. This strange man, rumour said, had written a book no copy of which had ever been sold. It described a week on the Concord and Merrimac rivers. The edition fell dead from the press, and all the books, one thousand or more, he had collected in his mother's house, a queer library of these unsold books which he used to exhibit to visitors laughing grimly over his unfortunate venture in the field of letters. My aunt sent me one day to carry a message to Mrs. Th.o.r.eau and my rap on her door was answered by no other man than this odd son who, on the threshold received my message. He stood in the doorway with hair which looked as if it had been dressed with a pine-cone, inattentive grey eyes, hazy with far-away musings, an emphatic nose and disheveled attire that bore signs of tramps in woods and swamps. Thinking of the forest fire I fancied he smelled of smoke and peered curiously up the staircase behind him hoping I might get a glimpse of that queer library all of one book duplicated one thousand times. The story went that his artless mother used to say that Emerson, when he talked, imitated Henry, and I well recall a certain slow hesitation and peculiar upward intonation which made me think of Emerson at whose house I had often been. The _Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers_ found its public at last and I suppose a copy of the first edition, authenticated as having belonged to that queer library, would easily bring to-day in the market its weight in gold. Whether or not Th.o.r.eau deserves great fame the critics sometimes discuss. I heard a distinguished man say that he was greatly inferior to Gilbert White of Selbourne, and I myself feel that Lowell in some of his essays recording his study of the nature life at Elmwood equalled in fine insight, and surpa.s.sed in expression the observer at Concord. Then in these later years we have had John Muir and John Burroughs who cannot be set low, but among American writers Th.o.r.eau was the pioneer of nature-study. Audubon had preceded him but he worked mainly with the brush; to mult.i.tudes Th.o.r.eau opened the gate to the secrets of our natural environment. The subtle delicacy of the gra.s.s-blade, the crystals of the snowflake, the icicle, the marvel of the weird lines traced by the flocks of wild geese athwart the heavens as they migrated, these he watched and recorded with loving accuracy and sensitive poetic feeling as no one in our land before had done. I have thrown a stone upon the cairn at Walden Pond which has now grown so high through the tributes of his grateful admirers. I shall throw still others in grateful admiration if the opportunity comes to me.

Many years ago I used to feel that Louisa Alcott and I were in a certain way bracketed together. Both were children of Concord in a sense, she by adoption and I through the fact that it had been the home of my forbears for seven generations. We were nearly of the same age and simultaneously made our first ventures into the world of letters, taking the same theme, the Civil War. One phase of this she portrayed in her _Hospital Sketches_, another, I in my _Colour Guard_. So we started in the race together but Louisa soon distanced me, emerging presently into matchless proficiency in her books for children. I sometimes saw her after she had become famous when she was attuning sweetly the hearts of mult.i.tudes of children with her fine humanity. She was a stately handsome woman with a most gracious and un.o.btrusive manner. She mingled with her neighbours, one of the quietest members of the circle. Said a kinswoman of mine who lived within a few doors:

It is so hard to think of Louisa as being a distinguished personage; she sits down here with her knitting or brings over her bread to be baked in my oven as anybody might do, and chats about village matters, as interested over the engagements of the girls and sympathising with those in sorrow as if she had no broader interest.

She was indeed one of those who bore her honours meekly. I recall her vividly when she was well past youth, in the enjoyment of the substantial gains success had brought. In her childhood she had known pinching poverty, for her philosophic father could never exchange his lucubrations for bread and clothes, philosophising, however, none the less. But her success brought with it no flush, only an opportunity for her pleasant service. In these years my mood toward her had quite changed; at first I had thought of her as a compet.i.tor, perhaps as on my level. When I learned, however, that about that time she had been reading my _History of German Literature_ with approval, I felt that I was greatly honoured, that a mind of high distinction had condescended to notice my pages. During the '80s when the "School of Philosophy" was holding its sessions in the rustic temple on the Lexington Road where her Orphic father was hierophant, it was rumoured that Louisa looked somewhat askance upon the sublimated discussions of the brotherhood that gathered. What was said was very wise, but far removed from what one finds in children's books, but Louisa was sometimes present, a dignified hostess to the strangers who came, taking her modest part among the women in the entertainment of the guests but never in the conclave as a partic.i.p.ant. Alas! that she went so prematurely to her grave in "Sleepy Hollow"!

Hawthorne came into my consciousness when I was a boy of ten at school near the tall stone gate-posts immortalised by the great novelist as guarding the entrance to the Old Manse. The big gambrel-roofed building standing close to the Battle Ground as it stood on the 19th of April, 1775, was unpainted and weather-stained, the structure showing dark among the trees as one looked from the road. All the world knows it as described outside and in by its famous tenant. It is a shrine which may well evoke breathless interest. The ancient wainscoting, the ample low-studded rooms, the quaint fireplace, and at the rear toward the west the windows with their small panes on some of which Hawthorne made inscriptions. "Every leaf and twig is outlined against the sky," or words to that effect, "scratched with my wife's diamond ring"; here the sunset pours in gorgeously but there is more of shadow than sunlight about the Old Manse, and that is befitting for a dwelling with a.s.sociations somewhat sombre. In later years Hawthorne occupied a house on the Lexington Road, new and modern, writing there some famous books in an upper study said to be accessible only through a trap-door, but the Old Manse was the appropriate home for him. It was there that his young genius produced its earlier fruit and it deserves to be particularly cherished. As a little child I went once with my father and mother to Brook Farm in West Roxbury, at the time when the community was most interesting. The famous disciples of Fourier were then, I suppose, for the most part present, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, George Ripley, George William Curtis, Charles A.

Dana and the rest, but I was too young to take note of them. I recall only George Ripley, the head of the enterprise, in a rough working-blouse who welcomed us at the gate. My father and he were old friends and as supper-time came and the community gathered singly and in groups in the dining-hall from the fields and groves outside, he said to my father: "Your seat at the table will be next to Hawthorne, but I shall not introduce you, Mr. Hawthorne prefers not to be introduced to people." It was a cropping out of the strange aloofness for which Hawthorne was marked. He could do his part in the day's work, be a man among men, d.i.c.ker with the importers at the Salem Custom House and as Consul at Liverpool, rub effectively with the traders, but his choice was always for solitude, he liked to go for days without speaking to a human being and to live withdrawn from the contacts of the world, even from his neighbours and family. Probably it was because he was so thoroughly a recluse that I recall seeing Hawthorne only once, although he was in the village in whose streets I was constantly pa.s.sing. Driving one day on the road near his home a companion exclaimed, "There goes Mr. Hawthorne on the sidewalk!" I put my head forward quickly to get a glimpse from the cover of the carriage of so famous a personage, and at the roadside was a fine, tall, athletic person with handsome features. My quick movement forward in the carriage he took for a bow and he returned it raising his hat with gentlemanly courtesy, it was all through a mistake that I got this bow from Hawthorne but all the same I treasure it. A sister-in-law of his, who was often an inmate of his home, told me that Hawthorne really believed in ghosts. It will be remembered that in the introduction to the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, Hawthorne speaks of the spectre of an ancient minister who haunted it, the rustling of his silken gown was sometimes heard in the hallways. My friend attributed this pa.s.sage to something which happened during one of her visits. She sat one evening with her sister and Hawthorne in the low-studded living-room, and, as was often the case, in silence.

She thought she heard in the entry the rustling of silk, it might have been a whistling of the wind or the swaying of a drapery, but it seemed to her like the sweeping along of a train of silk. At the moment she thought that Mrs. Hawthorne was pa.s.sing through the entry, but rousing herself from her abstraction she saw her sister sitting quiet and remembered that she had been so sitting for a considerable interval. "Why, I distinctly heard," said she, "the rustling of a silk gown in the entry!" The sisters rose and went into the hallway for an explanation, but all was dark and still, no draperies were stirring, no wind whistled, and they returned to their chairs, talking for a moment over the mysterious sound, then relapsing into their former quiet. Hawthorne meantime sat dreaming, apparently not noticing the light ripple in the quiet of the evening; but not long after--when my friend read the _Mosses from an Old Manse_, she found that the incident had made an impression upon him and that he interpreted the sound as a ghostly happening. She told me another story which she said she had directly from Hawthorne. During a sojourn in Boston he often went to the reading-room of the Athenaeum and was particularly interested to see a certain newspaper. This paper he often found in the hands of an old man and he was sometimes annoyed because the old man retained it so long. The old man lived in a suburb and for some reason was equally interested with himself in that paper. This went on for weeks until one day Hawthorne, entering the room, found the paper as usual in the hands of this man. Hawthorne sat down and waited patiently as often before until the old man had finished. After a time the man rose, put on his hat and overcoat, and took his departure. As the door of the reading-room closed behind him Hawthorne took up the paper which lay in disorder as the man had left it, when, lo and behold, his eye fell in the first column on a notice of the old man's death. He was at the moment lying dead in his house in the suburbs and yet Hawthorne had beheld him but a moment before in his usual guise reading the paper in the Athenaeum! My friend said that Hawthorne told her the story quietly without attempt at explanation and she believed his thought was that he had actually seen a ghost. The readers of Hawthorne will recall pa.s.sages which are consonant with the idea that Hawthorne believed in ghosts.

No other author has affected me quite so profoundly as did Hawthorne.

The period of my development from childhood through youth to maturity was coeval with the time of his literary activities. The first vivid impression I received from books came from his stories for children, _Grandfather's Chair_, _Famous Old People_, and _The Liberty Tree_; when somewhat older I read _The Rill from the Town Pump_ and _Little Annie's Ramble_, still later came the weird creations in which Hawthorne's expanding genius manifested itself, such as _The Minister's Black Veil_, _Rappaccini's Daughter_, and _The Celestial Railroad_. And not less in young manhood I was awed and absorbed in the great works of his maturity, _The Scarlet Letter_, _The Blithedale Romance_, _The House of the Seven Gables_, and the _Marble Faun._ Meat and drink as they were to me in my youth and first entrance into life, I naturally feel that the author of these books was in mind profoundly powerful.

In point of genius among our Americans I should set no man before him.

He was not a moral inspirer nor a leader, he gave to no one directly any spiritual uplift, nor did he help one directly to strength in fighting the battles of life. He was a peerless artist portraying marvellously the secret things of the human soul, his concrete pictures taken from the old Puritan society, from the New England of his day and from the pa.s.sionate Italian life. He portrays but he draws no lesson any more than Shakespeare, his books are pictures of the souls of men, of the sweet and wholesome things and also the weakness, the sin and the morbid defect. These having been revealed the reader is left to his own inferences. It is fully made plain that he was a soft-hearted man, at any rate in his earlier time. The stories he wrote at the outset for children are often full of sweetness and sympathy. But as he went on with his work these qualities are less apparent, the spirit of the artist more and more prevailing, until he paints with relentless realism even what is hideous, not approving or condemning; it is part of life and must be set down. Many have thought it strange that Hawthorne apparently had no patriotism. In our Civil War he stood quite indifferent, a marked contrast with the men among whom he lived and who like him have literary eminence. These pa.s.sages stand in his diary and letters. "February 14, 1862, Frank Pierce came here to-night.... He is bigoted as to the Union and sees nothing but ruin without it. Whereas I should not much regret an ultimate separation." "At present we have no country.... New England is really quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can take in. I have no kindred with or leaning toward the abolitionists." But his coolness to his country's welfare was of a piece with the general coolness toward well and ill in the affairs of the world. Humanity rolls before him as it did before Shakespeare, sometimes weak, sometimes heroic, depressed, exultant, suffering, happy. He did not concern himself to regulate its movement, to heighten its joy, or mitigate its sorrow.

His work was to portray it as it moved, and in that conception of his mission he established his masterfulness as an artist, though it abates somewhat, does it not? from his wholeness as a man.

Some years ago in introducing Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson to an audience in St. Louis, I said that our great-grandfathers had stood together with the Minute Men of Concord at the North Bridge on the 19th of April, 1775. His ancestor as their minister inspiring them with the idea of freedom, my ancestor as an officer, who by word and deed kept the farmers firm before the British volleys. The old-time connection between the two families persisted. Ralph Waldo Emerson and my father were contemporaries coming through the Harvard gate into the small company of Unitarian ministers at about the same period and somewhat a.s.sociated in their young manhood. Mrs. Emerson had been Lydia Jackson of Plymouth, baptised, into the old Pilgrim Parish by the father of my mother. Lydia Jackson and my mother had been girls together, and good friends. It was natural, therefore, that, with these antecedents when I as a young boy arrived in Concord, I should come into touch with the Emersons. They were indeed pleasant friends to me, both Mr. and Mrs.

Emerson receiving with kindness the child whose parents they had known when children. The Emerson house on the Lexington Road is to-day a world-renowned shrine, sixty years ago it was the quiet home of a peaceful family, lovely as now through its natural beauty but not yet sought out by many pilgrims. The fame of Emerson, only recently established by his _Nature_ and the earlier poems, was just beginning to spread into world-wide proportions.

I have before me his image, in his vigorous years, the sloping rather narrow shoulders, the slender frame erect and sinewy but never robust, and a keen, firm face. In his glance was complete kindliness and also profound penetration. His nose was markedly expressive, sharp, and well to the fore. In his lips there was geniality as well as firmness.

His smooth hair concealed a head and brow not large but well rounded.

His face was always without beard. Though slight, he was vigorous and the erect figure striding at a rapid pace could be encountered any day in all weathers, not only on the streets but in the fields and woods.

Unlike his neighbour Hawthorne his instincts were always social. He mingled affably with low and high and I have never heard a more hearty tribute to him than came from an Irish washwoman, his neighbour, who only knew him as he chatted with her over the fence about the round of affairs that interested her. He always had a smile and a pleasant word for the school-children and at town-meeting bore his part among the farmers in discussing the affairs of the community. His voice in particular bespoke the man. It had a rich resonance and a subtle quality that gave to the most cursory listener an impression of culture. His speech was deliberate, sometimes hesitating, and his phrases often, even when he talked on simple themes, had especial point and appropriateness.

As a child I recall him among groups of children in his garden a little aloof but beaming with a happy smile. At a later time, when I was in college, we used sometimes to walk the twenty miles from Cambridge to Concord and the student group always found in him a hospitable entertainer. By that time he had reached the height of his fame. Those of us who sought him had been readers of _Nature_ or the poems, of _Representative Men_, and of _English Traits_.

For my own part while I did not always understand his thought, much of it was entering into my very fibre. In particular the essays on self-reliance and idealism were moulding my life. We approached him with some awe, "If he asks me where I live," said one of our number, a boy who was slain in the Civil War, "I shall tell him I can be found at No. So-and-so of such an alley, but if you mean to predicate concerning the spiritual ent.i.ty, I dwell in the temple of the infinite and I breathe the breath of truth." But when Emerson met us at the gate, things were not at all on a high transcendental plane. There was a hearty "Good-morning," significant from him as he stood among the syringas, and there were sandwiches and strawberries in profusion, a plain bread-and-b.u.t.ter atmosphere very pleasant to us after a long and dusty tramp. On one occasion Emerson withdrew into the background, we thought too much, while he gave the front place in the library, after he had superintended royally the satisfaction of our bodily needs, to his neighbour Bronson Alcott. Mr. Alcott white-haired and oracular, talked to us about Shakespeare. There was probably a secondary sense in every line of Shakespeare which would become apparent to all such as attained the necessary fineness of soul. Perhaps we should find in this the gospel of a new Covenant in which Shakespeare would be the great teacher and leader. Mysteries were gathering about him, who was he? Who really wrote his plays and poems? The adumbrations of a new supernatural figure were looming in the conception of the world.

Mr. Alcott mused through the afternoon in characteristic fashion and Emerson sat with us, silently absorbing the mystic speculation.

But Mr. Emerson was not always silent. A good friend of his who was akin to me and over partial, invited him to her house with a little circle of neighbours and lo, I was to furnish the entertainment! I had written a college poem and with some sinking of heart I learned that I was to read it to this company of which Emerson was to be a member.

I faced the music and for half an hour rolled off my stanzas. At the close, my kinswoman arranged that I should talk with Emerson in a corner by ourselves and for another half-hour he talked to me. I am bound to say that he said little about my poem, but devoted himself almost entirely to an enthusiastic outpouring over Walt Whitman's _Leaves of Gra.s.s_, an advance copy of which had just been sent him. A stronger commendation of a piece of literary work than he gave it would be hard to conceive. He had been moved by it to the depths and his forecast for its author was a fame of the brightest. It was then I first heard of Walt Whitman. Soon after the world heard much of him and it still hears much of him. Emerson did not confine the expression of his admiration of Walt Whitman to me, as the world knows; he expressed it with an equal outspokenness to the poet, who curiously enough thought it proper to print it in gilt letters on the cover of his book, "I greet you at the beginning of a great career."

To do that was certainly a violation of literary comity, but who shall give laws to rough-riding genius! It is a penalty of eminence to be made sponsor unwittingly before the public for men and things when reticence would seem better. At any rate it brought Whitman well into notice and I have never heard, rough diamond though he undoubtedly was, that Walt Whitman's withers were wrung by this breach of confidence.

There is a little nook by Gore Hall in Cambridge with which I have a queer medley of a.s.sociations. One night I was tossed in a blanket there during my initiation into the Hasty Pudding Club. Precisely there I met Emerson rather memorably on the Commemoration Day in 1865 when he said to me, glancing at my soldier's uniform, in very simple words but with an intonation that betrayed deep feeling, "This day belongs to you." Immediately after, hard by I shook hands with Meade, the towering stately victor of Gettysburg in the full uniform of a corps commander, in contrast indeed to the slight, plainly-dressed philosopher. And only the other day I helped my little granddaughter to feed the grey squirrels in the same green nook from which the rollicking boys, the sage, and the warrior have so long since vanished.

I have heard it remarked by a man of much literary discrimination that Emerson's poetic gift was pre-eminent and that he should have made verse and not prose his princ.i.p.al medium for expression. As it is his poems are few, his habitual medium being prose. The critic attributed this to a distrust which Emerson felt of his power of dealing with poetic form, the harmonious arrangement of lines. He felt that Emerson was right in his judgment of himself, that there was a defect here, and that it was well for him to choose as he did. All this I hesitate to accept. As regards form, while the verse of Emerson certainly is sometimes rough, few things in poetry are more exquisite than many verses which all will recall. What stanzas ever flowed more sweetly than these written for the dedication of the Concord monument? "By the rude bridge that arched the flood," or the little poem on the snow-storm, "Announced by all the trumpets of the sky arrives the snow." _The Boston Hymn_, too, though in parts informal to the point of carelessness, has pa.s.sages of the finest music,

"The rocky nook with hill-tops three, Looked eastward from the farms And twice each day the flowing sea Took Boston in its arms."

Emerson when he gave his mind to it could sing as harmoniously as the best. Possibly we ought to regret that he did not write for the most part in verse. It is verse which comes and clings most closely to our souls and which memory holds most permanently. Prose is the inferior medium when a great utterance is addressed to men, it is the singer pre-eminently who holds our hearts and lives forever. But Emerson chose to be what he was and we are thankful for him. Many were vexed with Matthew Arnold whom we thought depreciatory, but I find no fault with his summing up of Emerson, "as the friend of all those who seek to live in the spirit." His prose and poetry are a precious possession and we should be grateful for both, and for him. But my purpose here as always is not to criticise but only to touch the light outside things, pausing at the edge of profundities.

I knew Emerson when I was a child and I also knew him when I was well advanced in years at a time when, of course, he was close upon his end. His old age was pathetic. As often happens his memory failed while his other faculties were strong and the embarra.s.sment of the thinker aroused sadness in those who came near him as the trusty servant fell short, though the mind in general was active. Emerson felt that I had put him under some obligation by giving him the first portrait he had ever seen of his faithful German disciple and translator Hermann Grimm. Perhaps that helped the welcome with which I was received when I went to see him not far from the end.

I had as a fellow-guest a man who had long been intimate with him and whom he was very glad to see; talking after tea in the library Emerson said, "I want to tell you about a friend in Germany, his name I cannot remember," and he moved to and fro uneasily, in his effort to recall it. "This friend with whom we have taken tea to-night, whose name also I cannot remember," here again came a distressed look at the failure of his faculty, "I cannot remember his name either, but he can tell you of this German friend whose name I have also forgotten." It was a sorrow to see the breaking down of a great spirit and his agitation as he was conscious of his waning power. And yet so far as I could see, it was only the memory that was going; the intellectual strength was still apparent and the amiability of his spirit was perhaps even more manifest than in the years when he was in the full possession of himself. This came out in little things; he was over-anxious at the table lest the hospitality should come short, troubled about the supply of b.u.t.ter and apple-sauce, and soon after I saw him on his knees on the hearth taking care that the fire should catch the wood to abate the evening coolness that was gathering in the room. At the same time his mood was playful. Mrs. Emerson sat at hand, a woman in her old age of striking beauty, with her silver hair beneath a cap of lace, her violet eyes, and her white face. Miss Ellen Emerson, too, was present, shielding her father in his decline like a guardian angel. Mrs. Emerson spoke with pleasure of her old life at Plymouth.

"Ah, Plymouth," broke in Emerson, "that town of towns. We shall never hear the last of Plymouth!" And so he rallied his wife merrily over her patriotic love for her birthplace. The time was coming for him to go and he went serenely, the vital cord softly and gradually disengaged. In Sleepy Hollow lie near each other the four memorable graves, Hawthorne's, Th.o.r.eau's, Louisa Alcott's, and Emerson's. I know the spot well, on the ridge which slopes up from the lower ground, for there my own kin lie buried. Upon the same ridge rise the tall oracular pines and there is always a sweet murmur which the feeling heart understands as a sub-conscious requiem breathed by the "Nature"

of which these fine spirits were the interpreters.

A day or two after entering college I made one of a group of freshmen, who, as the dusk fell, were working off their surplus energy by jumping over the posts along the curbstone of a quiet street. One of our number had an unfair advantage, his length of leg being so great that as he bestrode the post, he scarcely needed to take his feet from the ground, while for the rest of us a good hop was necessary fairly to clear the top. That is my earliest memory of Phillips Brooks. Big as he was, he was a year, perhaps two years, younger than most of us, and had the boyishness proper to his immaturity. He had come from his long training in the Boston Latin School, was reputed, like the rest of his cla.s.s, to be able to repeat the Latin and Greek grammars from beginning to end, exceptions, examples, and all, and to have at his tongue's end other acquirements equally wonderful in the eyes of us boys who in our distant Western homes had had a smaller chance. He was an excellent scholar without needing to apply himself, and perhaps had more distinction in the student societies than in the cla.s.s-room.

Socially he was good-natured and playful, never aggressive, too modest to be a leader, rather reticent. It was with surprise that I heard Brooks for the first time in a college society. The quiet fellow of a sudden poured out a torrent of words and, young though I was, I felt that they were not empty. There was plenty of thought and well-arranged knowledge. This pregnant fluency always characterised his public deliverances. Of late years it has been reported that he had at first a defect of speech, and to this the extraordinary momentum of his utterance was due. In the early time I never heard of this. He did not stammer, nor was there other impediment; only this preternaturally rapid outpouring on occasion, from a man usually quiet. When I heard him preach in later years the peculiarity remained. It was the Phillips Brooks of the Inst.i.tute of 1770, matured, however, into n.o.ble spiritual power.

Brooks had attained nearly or quite his full height on entering college, nor was he slender. His large frame was too loosely knit to admit of his becoming an athlete. He had no interest in outdoor sports. I do not recall that he was warmly diligent in study or general reading. His mind worked quickly and easily. Without effort he stood well in the cla.s.s, absorbing whatever other knowledge he touched without much searching. His countenance and head in boyhood were noticeably fine, the forehead broad and full, the beardless face lighting up readily with an engaging smile, the eyes large and l.u.s.trous. It was evident that a good and able man must come out from the boy Phillips Brooks, but no one, not even President Walker, who was credited with an almost uncanny penetration in divining the future of his boys, would have predicted the career of Brooks. Though decorous and high-minded he was not marked as a religious man. If he were so, he kept it to himself. Though sometimes hilarious, he was never ungentle or inconsiderate, a wholesome, happy youth, having due thought for others and for his own walk and conversation, but without touch of formal piety. When I was initiated into the Hasty Pudding Club, I recognised in a tall fiend whose trouser legs were very apparent beneath the too scanty black drapery which enveloped him, no other than Phillips Brooks. He was one of the most vociferous of the imps who tossed me in the blanket, and later, when the elaborate ma.n.u.script I had prepared was brought forth, was conspicuously energetic in daubing with hot mush from a huge wooden spoon the sheets I had composed with much painstaking. The grand event in the "Pudding"

of our time was the performance of Fielding's extravaganza of _Tom Thumb_. I think it was the club's first attempt at an operatic performance, and it was prepared with great care. I suppose I am to-day the only survivor among those who took part, and it is a sombre pleasure to recall the old-time frolic. The great promoter of the undertaking was Theodore Lyman, able and forceful afterward as soldier, scientist, and congressman, who died prematurely; but the music and details were arranged by Joseph C. Heywood, later a devout Catholic, ending his career in Rome as Chamberlain of Pope Leo XIII.

In the cast Heywood was King Arthur and Lyman, general of the army.

There were besides, a throng of warriors, lords, and ladies wonderful to behold. The costumes were elaborate. Old trunks and attics of our friends were ransacked for ancient finery and appointments that might be made to serve. Provision was made for thrilling stage effects, chief among them a marvellous cow which at a critical moment swallowed Tom Thumb, and then with much eructation worked out painfully on the ba.s.s-viol, belched him forth as if discharged from a catapult. The music was an adaptation of popular airs, operatic and otherwise, to the words of Fielding, and was fairly good, rendered as it was by fresh young voices and an orchestra whose members played in the Pierian Sodality. The merriment of the lines was more robust than delicate, but with some pruning it pa.s.sed. The bill of announcement, which was hung up in the Pudding room, and which possibly is still preserved, was very elaborately and handsomely designed, and I think was the work of Alexander Aga.s.siz, who had much skill of that kind.

The performers were all strenuous and some capable, but the hit of the evening was Phillips Brooks, who personated the giantess Glumdalca to perfection. He was then nineteen, and had reached his full stature.

He was attired in flowing skirts and befitting bodice, and wore a towering head-dress of feather dusters or something similar, which swept the ceiling as he strode. I had been cast originally for the Queen, but it was afterwards judged that I had special qualifications for the part of Princess. Like the youths in Comus, my unrazored lips in those days were as smooth as Hebe's, and I had a slenderness that was quite in keeping. Dressed in an old brocade gown, an heirloom from the century before, with a lofty white wig, and proper patches upon my pink cheeks, I essayed the role of _une belle dame sans merci_.

Brooks and I were rivals for the affection of Tom Thumb, and I do not recall which succeeded. The tragedy was most extreme. In the closing scene the entire cast underwent destruction, strewing the stage with a picturesque heap of slain. We were not so very dead, for the victims near the foot-lights in order to give the curtain room to fall, drew up their legs or rolled out of the way, in a spirit of polite accommodation. The most impressive part of the spectacle was the defunct giantess, whose wide-spreading draperies and head-gear, as Brooks came down with a well-studied crash, took up so much of the floor that the rest of us had no room left to die in dignity. The piece was so much of a success that we performed it again at the house of Theodore Lyman, in Brookline,--and still again, at Chickering Hall in Boston.

Though Brooks could frolic upon occasion, his mood in his student days was prevailingly grave, and as he matured, warmed, and deepened into earnest religious conviction. My own close a.s.sociation with him came to an end at our graduation. Our respective fates led us in fields widely apart, and we met only at rare intervals. Ten years after graduation we came together in a way for me memorable. He was already held in the affectionate reverence of mult.i.tudes, and perhaps established in the position in which he so long stood as the most moving and venerated of American preachers. At the commemoration for the Harvard soldiers, in 1865, he was the chaplain, and his prayer shares with the _Commemoration Ode_ of Lowell the admiration of men as an utterance especially uplifting. My humble function on that day was to speak for the rank and file, and Brooks and I, as cla.s.smates, sat elbow to elbow at the table under the great tent. He was charmingly genial and brotherly. His old playfulness came out as he rallied me on the deterioration he noticed in my table manners, due no doubt to my life in camp, and rebuked me with mock sternness for appropriating his portion of our common chicken. With evident pleasure, he drew out of his pocket the _Nation_, then just beginning, and showed me a kind notice of my _Thinking Bayonet_, written by Charles Eliot Norton. But behind the smile and the joke lay a new dignity and earnestness, a quality he had taken on since the days of our old comradeship. So it always was as we met transiently while the decades pa.s.sed until the threshold of old age lay across the path for both of us. Now and then I had from him an affectionate letter. One of these I found profoundly touching. Theodore Lyman lay prostrate with a lingering and painful illness from which he never rose. Brooks wrote that he had carried to him my _Life of Young Sir Henry Vane_, and read from it to our dying friend. My story had interest for them, and I felt that whatever might befall my book I had not worked in vain if two such men found it worthy.

Phillips Brooks early had recognition as the most important religious influence of his time, and his spirit was not less broad-minded than it was fervent. In the mult.i.tudes that felt the power of his impa.s.sioned address were included men and women of the most various views, and he quickened the life of the spirit in all households of faith. His sympathies were most catholic, and this anecdote clearly illuminates his broad-mindedness. I had dropped into a Boston bookstore on a quiet morning; Brooks presently came in to browse over the new issues on the counters. There was no one to disturb us, as we enjoyed this our last conversation together. He spoke of Channing. "Do you know," said he, "when Dean Stanley came over here I went to East Boston to see him on his ship. He said to me almost at once, 'Where is Mount Auburn?' Why, said I, how strange that the first thing you inquire about as you arrive is a cemetery! 'But is not Channing buried there?' said he. I told him I did not know. 'Well, he is and I want to go at once to the grave of Channing!' So as soon as we could,"

continued Phillips Brooks, "we took a carriage and drove to Mount Auburn to visit the grave of Channing." He sympathised fully with the admiration felt by his friend, the great English churchman, for Channing, and gladly did him homage, and his talk flowed on in channels that showed his heart was warm toward men of all creeds who were inspired by the higher life. This n.o.ble candour of mind was a marked element of his power, and has endeared his memory among scores of sects that too often clash. How sweetly unifying in the midst of a jarring Christendom has been the spirit of Phillips Brooks!

After this I saw him only once. It was at the funeral of James Russell Lowell. In Appleton Chapel he stood in his robes, gentle and powerful, as he read the burial service. When the body was committed to the grave I stood just behind him and heard his voice in the last hallowed sentences, "Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and the spirit to the G.o.d who gave it." I never heard that voice again.

CHAPTER IX

MEN OF SCIENCE

In England, in the fall of 1870, I missed an opportunity to see the great scientific men of the time. Faraday was still active, and in the full ripeness of his fame. Huxley, Tyndall, Darwin, Sir Joseph Hooker, Joule, Lyell, Murchison were in the midst of their best work, and probably all or most of them were present at the meeting of the British a.s.sociation, which took place that year somewhere in the west of England. Miss Frances Power Cobbe, with whom I had for some time maintained a correspondence, growing out of the interest I felt in her _Intuitive Morals_, and other writings, invited me to accompany her to the meeting, at which, introduced by her, I might have had interesting interviews. I let the chance go by, and feel to-day that my memory stands impoverished in that it holds no first-hand knowledge of the lights, who in their century were the glory of their country and the world.

In Germany I was more fortunate. Arriving at Heidelberg at a time before its high prestige had suffered much diminution, I found in all the four Faculties men of great distinction. One hears that in the stern centralising to which since 1870 Germany has been subjected the outer universities have suffered, their strength, their able teachers, namely, being drawn away for a brilliant concentration at Berlin.

In the little university town of those days students and professors rubbed closely and great men were sometimes found in odd environments.

Expressing once a desire to see a certain venerable theologian of wide fame, I was told he was sure to be found on such and such evenings in a well-known _bier locale_, and there I had opportunity to observe him, an aged and withered figure, with a proper stein of the amber fluid frothing at his side, and a halo from an active pipe enwreathing his grey hair, as he joked and gossiped familiarly with his fellow-loiterers about the heavy oak table. At another time I was among surroundings less rough, the guest-room of a club of the finer world, curtained and carpeted, and made attractive with pictures, flowers, and music. A company of ladies and gentlemen sat sipping _Maiwein_ and _Mark grafler_, while a conjurer entertained them with his tricks. During one of these, desiring a confederate from the lookers-on, he approached a slender and refined-looking man, who was following the necromancer's proceedings with as much interest as anybody. The wizard's air of deference, and the respectful looks of the company led me to infer that he was a man above the common, but he took part affably in what was going on, helped out the trick, and laughed and wondered with the rest when it succeeded. I presently learned to my surprise and amus.e.m.e.nt that the amiable confederate of the conjurer was no other than the physicist Kirchoff, then in fresh and brilliant fame as the inventor of the spectroscope and the initiator of the scientific method known as spectrolysis. The fact has long been known that a prism properly contrived will decompose a ray of white light into the seven primary colours, but the broad and narrow bands running across the variegated scheme of the spectrum had either escaped notice or been neglected as phenomena not significant.

Now came, however, my genial fellow-guest of the Heidelberg Club, detecting that the lines of the spectrum were one thing or another according to the substance emitting the light, and forthwith the world became aware of a discovery of vast moment. The light of the sun, and of the stars more distant than the sun, could be a.n.a.lysed or spectrolised, and a certain knowledge was shed of what was burning there in the immensely distant s.p.a.ces. We can know what const.i.tutes a star as unerringly as we know the const.i.tuents of the earth. Still more, among the supposed elements to which painstaking chemists had reduced composite matter, many were found by the all-discerning prism to be not ultimate, but themselves susceptible of subtler division.

In fact here was a method of chemical and physical a.n.a.lysis, much more powerful, and also more delicate, than had before been known, and the idea of the scientists as to the make-up of the material universe deepened and widened wondrously. I sat often among the crowd of students in Kirchoff's lecture-room, watching the play of his delicate features as he unravelled mysteries which till he showed the way were a mere hopeless knot. Near him as he spoke, on a table were the wand, the rings, the vials, above all a spectroscope with its prisms, the apparatus with which the magician solved the universe. Once, as I stood near him, he indicated in a polite sentence, with a gesture toward the table, that I was free to use these appliances. In the depth of my unknowledge I felt I could not claim to be even a tyro, and was duly abashed beneath the penetrating eye. But it is interesting to think that for a moment once I held the attention of so potent a Prospero.

In those days the name of Kirchoff was coupled always with that of an a.s.sociate, the chemist Bunsen, when there was mention of spectrum-a.n.a.lysis; and in my time at Heidelberg, Bunsen was at hand and I became as familiar with his figure as with Kirchoff. In frame Bunsen was of the burly burgomaster type not rare among the Teutons, and as I saw him in his laboratory to which I sometimes gained access through students of his, he moved about in some kind of informal _schlafrock_ or working dress of ample dimensions, with his large head crowned by a peculiar cap. On the tables within the s.p.a.ces flickered numerously the "Bunsen burners," his invention, and it was easy to fancy as one saw him, surrounded by the large company of reverent disciples, that you were in the presence of the hierophant of some abstruse and mysterious cult, in whose honour waved the many lambent flames. I think he was unmarried, without domestic ties, and lived almost night and day among his crucibles and retorts, devoted to his science and pupils toward whom he showed a regard almost fatherly.

In his lecture-room, in more formal dress he was less picturesque, but still a man to arouse deep interest. He was in the front rank of the chemists of all time, and I suppose had equal merit with Kirchoff in the momentous discovery in which their names are linked.

There was, however, at this time in Heidelberg a scientist probably of greater prestige than even these, whose contemporary influence was more dominant, and whose repute is now, and likely to be hereafter more prevailing. In my walks in a certain quiet street, I sometimes met a man who made an unusual impression of dignity and power. He had the bearing of a leader of men in whatever sphere he might move, ma.s.sive and well-statured, his dress not obtrusive but carefully appointed, with an eye and face to command. His manner was courteous, not domineering, and I wondered who the able, high-bred gentleman might be, for he carried all that in his air as he pa.s.sed along the street. It was the ill.u.s.trious Helmholtz, then in his best years, with great achievements behind him and before. His researches in many fields were profound and far extending. I suppose his genius was at its best when dealing with the pervasive imponderable ether that extends out from the earth into the vast planetary s.p.a.ces in whose vibrations are conditioned the phenomena of light. No subject of investigation can be more elusive. The mind that could grapple with this and arrive at the secrets and laws of the subtle medium through which the human eye receives impression is indeed worthy of our veneration. Probably, excepting Humboldt, no German scientist in these later centuries has reached such eminence. The fields of the two men were widely different. The one we know best as the scientific traveller, roaming the earth over, and reducing to ordered knowledge what can be perceived of its fauna and flora, of the strata that underlie it, the oceans that toss upon it, the atmosphere that surrounds it. The other roved not widely, but keeping to his lenses and calculations, penetrated perhaps more profoundly. Helmholtz, a well-born youth, began his career as a surgeon in the Prussian army, and his service there, no doubt, contributed to the manly carriage for which he was conspicuous. He married a lady of a n.o.ble house of Wuertemberg, and moved in an environment conducive to courtly manners.

Heidelberg, like the German universities in general well understood that ability in its teachers, and not a pompous architectural display, makes a great inst.i.tution. Its buildings were scattered and unpretending. Helmholtz had a lecture-room and laboratory apart, in a structure modern and graceful, but modest in its appeal. Here he discoursed to reverent throngs in tones never loud or confident. It is for wiseacres and charlatans to declaim and domineer. The masters are deferential in the presence of the sublimities and of the intelligences they are striving to enlighten.

In Germany I saw the great lights of science from afar, coming into relations of intimacy only with one or two _privat-docents_, young men struggling precariously for a foothold. One such striver I came to know well, a young man gifted but physically crippled, who, being anxious to get up his English, as I was to get up my German, entered with me into an arrangement to converse in these alternately.

We were about on a par in our knowledge or ignorance of the speech not native to us, and helped each other merrily out of the pitfalls into which we stumbled, according as English or German ruled the time.

I was aghast to find that I had been telling my new German acquaintances that while a married man, I had _deserted_ and _cast off_ my wife and little boy in America, when I meant to say only that I had left them behind during my temporary sojourn. A treacherous inseparable prefix had imparted to my "leaving them" an unlooked-for emphasis. The laugh for the moment was on me, but only for the moment. A little later Knopff was telling me of the old ma.n.u.scripts in the library illuminated gorgeously by "de pious and skilful monkeys of de Middle Ages." He was a bright fellow, and I have hoped I might encounter his name in some honourable connection. If he survived it was as one of the _unbekannt_, an affix very dreadful to young aspirants for university honours.

As regards the men who, during the past seventy-five years have so greatly widened our scientific knowledge, I have had contact with those of Germany only for brief periods, and in the outer circle. As to their American brethren, fate has been more kind to me. I have sat as a pupil at the feet of the most eminent, and with some I have stood in the bond of friendship.