The Last Leaf Part 8

Divinity Hall, at Harvard University, has always had a pleasant seclusion. Near the end of its long, well-shaded avenue, it had in the rear the fine trees of Norton's Woods, and fifty years ago pleasant fields stretching before. Of late the Ampelopsis has taken it into its especial cherishing, draping it with a close green luxuriance that can scarcely be matched elsewhere. Moreover it is dominated by the lordly pile of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. "Whence and what art thou, execrable shape!" a theologue once exclaimed as the walls were rising, feeling that there must always be a battle between what the old Hall stood for and the new building was to foster. But the structures have gone on in harmony, and many a devotee of science has had hospitable welcome in the quarters intended for the recruits of what so many suppose to be the opposing camp. There was a notable case of this kind in my own time.

One pleasant afternoon a group of "divinities" (Ye G.o.ds, that that should have been our t.i.tle in the nomenclature of the University!) were chatting under one of the western porches. Talk turned upon an instructor, whose hand upon our essays was felt to be soft rather than critical, and who was, therefore, set low. "By Holy Scripture," broke out one, "a soft hand is a good thing. A soft hand, sir, turneth away wrath." The window close by opened into the room of Simon Newcomb, a youth who had no part in our studies, but of whom we made a chum. In those days he could laugh at such a joke as it blew in at his window with the thistle-down,--indeed was capable of such things himself.

It is a bit odd that as I come to write of him, this small witticism of half a century back should thrust itself obstinately into my memory, but after all it may not be out of place. The impression of the greatness of a mountain we get powerfully if the eye can measure it from the waif of seaweed at low tide up to the snow-cap of the summit. At this and similar jokes the boy Simon Newcomb connived, as he moved in our crowd. They were the waifs at low tide from which his towering mind rose to the measuring of the courses of the stars. He came among us as a student of the Lawrence scientific school, muscular and heavy-shouldered from work on sh.o.r.e and at the oar in Nova Scotia.

Though not slovenly, he was the reverse of trim. His rather outlandish clothes, pressed once for all when they left the shop of the provincial tailor, held his st.u.r.dy elbows and knees in bags moulded accurately to the capacious joints. His hair hung rebelliously, and his nascent beard showed an untrained hand at the razor. But his brow was broad, his eye clear and intelligent, and he was a man to be reckoned with. He was barely of age, but already a computer in the _Nautical Almanac_ office, then located at Cambridge, and we well knew work of that sort required brains of the best. Since Simon Newcomb's death an interesting story has been told about his heredity.

His strong-brained father, measuring his own qualities with rigid introspection, discovering where he was weak and where capable resolved that whatever wife he chose should supplement in her personality the points to which he lacked. He would father sons and daughters who should come into the world well appointed; in particular he looked toward offspring who should possess high scientific gifts.

With this mind he set out on his courting, and steering clear of vain entanglements with rather preternatural coolness, at last in a remote village, satisfied himself that he had found his complement. He permitted his docile heart to fall in love, and in due course there was born into the world a great man. The wooing has a humorous aspect,--this steering of unruly Hymen! The calculated result, however, did not fail of appearance, and perhaps the world might profit from such an example. I was strongly drawn toward Simon Newcomb by his unlikeness to myself. I was town-bred and he full of strength gained in the fields and along the beach. My own disinclination for mathematics was marked, but I had a vast admiration for a man to whom its processes were easy. We became very good friends. He was a genial fellow, capable as I have said of taking or making a joke, yet his moods were prevailingly serious, and he had already hitched his waggon to a star. Abnormally purposeful perhaps, a cropping out no doubt of heredity, he had set a high mark for himself and was already striving toward it. In an autobiographical fragment he says, referring to his early surrender of his powers to high mathematical work:

To this work I was especially attracted, because its preparation seemed to me to embody the highest intellectual power to which man has ever attained.

The matter used to present itself to my mind somewhat in this way.... There are tens of thousands of men who could be successful in all the ordinary walks of life. Thousands who could gain wealth, hundreds who could wield empires, for one who could take up the astronomical problems with any hope of success. The men who have done it are therefore in intellect the select few of the human race, an aristocracy ranking above all others in the scale of being. The astronomical _ephemeris_ is the last practical outcome of their productive genius.

In pursuing their lives men no doubt follow the line of least resistance, and Simon Newcomb here we may be sure was no exception; thus he chose to deal in his work with the heaviest and most perplexing problems with which the human intellect can engage. I do not attempt to describe or estimate what he achieved. Only a few select minds in his generation were capable of that. At his death the tributes of those who had a right to speak were unmeasured. Perhaps no human mind ever attacked more boldly the uttermost difficulties, and indeed have been more successful in the wrestle. He was set by the side of Hipparchus, of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, and Sir Isaac Newton. In a cla.s.s thus lofty, his scientific fellows have judged that he had a t.i.tle to stand. In their high strivings he was equally zealous, and his achievement was comparable with theirs. Nevertheless, had his disposition inclined him, there were many other paths into which he might have struck with success. His versatility was marked and he did try his hand at various tasks, at finance, political economy, belles-lettres. James Bryce, who knew him well, is said to have seen in him the stuff for a great man-of-affairs, a leader of armies or a captain of industry. His excursions, however, into such fields, though sometimes noteworthy in result, were transient and more or less half-hearted. His allegiance, given so early to the sublimest of pursuits, held him to the end. The Government of the United States placed him in its highest scientific position, at the head of the Naval Observatory, and his serious work from first to last was in the solemn labyrinths where the stars cross and re-cross, and here he was one of the most masterful of master-minds.

It was full fifty years since Simon Newcomb and I were boys together in Divinity Hall. No letter or message had ever pa.s.sed between us. I had followed the course of his fame, and felt happy that I had once known him. Returning to my lodgings, during a sojourn in Washington, I was told I had had a visitor, a man well on in years, plain in attire, and rugged-faced. The card he left bore the name "Simon Newcomb." I sought him out at once, and have rarely felt more honoured than that my old friend, learning casually of my whereabouts, had felt the impulse to find me and renew our former intercourse. After a half-century the boy was still discernible in the aging man. The big brow remained and the keen and thoughtful eye. His dress and manner were simple, as of old. He was ent.i.tled to wear the insignia of a rear-admiral, and had long lived in refined surroundings which might have made him fastidious. In look and bearing, however, he was the hearty, friendly man of the Nova Scotia coast, careless of frills and fine manners.

It was a red-letter day for me when Simon Newcomb met me at the door of the Cosmos Club, of which he was then president, and presented me as his guest to one and another of the select company of men who formed its membership. He moved among them as unostentatious and simple-mannered as he had been as a boy, with a catholic interest in all the varying topics which held the sympathies of the crowd, and able well to hold his own whatever might be the field of the conversation. Bishop, poet, scientist, historian, he had common ground with them all. I sat with him in his study, among heaped-up papers inscribed with the most abstruse and intricate calculations. It did not affect the warmth of his welcome that I had no partnership with him in these difficult pursuits. He was broad enough to take cognizance, too, of the things I cared for. It was hard to feel that the man there hitting off aptly a prominent personality or historic event mooted in our little human world was at the same time in the planetary confidences, and that when you shook his hand at parting, he would turn to interpreting the sweet influences of the Pleiades and the mysteries of the bands that hold Orion. Coming home from an interview with Simon Newcomb, late at night I paused on the terrace at the west front of the Capitol and looked back upon the heavens widely stretching above the city. The stars glittered cold, far, and silent, but I had been with a man who in a sense walked and talked with them and found them sympathetic. In the power of pure intellect I felt I had never known a greater man.

On an autumn day in the early fifties, as I loitered in the green-house of the Botanic Garden at Cambridge, a lithe bare-headed man, in rough brown attire, came quickly stepping in from the flower-beds outside. He was in his fullest vigour, his hair more inclined to stand erect than to lie smooth, his dark eyes full of animation. It was a noticeably vivid and alert personality, and as he tossed on to a working-table a heavy sheaf of long-stemmed plants, wet from a recent shower and bent over them in sharp scrutiny, I knew I was in the presence of Asa Gray, the first of American botanists.

He had come as a boy from a remote rural district, and with few advantages, following the bent of a marked scientific genius, he had won for himself before reaching middle life a leading place. I was soon to know him better, for it was my fortunate lot to be one in the crowd of juniors which for a term lined up before him once a week or so in Holden Chapel. The small peculiarities of great men have an interest, and the function I am seeking now to fulfil is to make sharp the ordinary presentment of the eminent characters I touch. I recall of Asa Gray, that with the cla.s.s, he sat at his desk behind a substantial rail, which fenced him in from the boys in the front row, his seat a little raised and the notes before him made plain by a narrow light-well, which in the Holden of those days opened over the teacher's head to a sky-light in the roof. Gray's utterance was rather hesitant. He would catch for his word often, reiterating meanwhile the article, "the-a, the-a, the-a," his gaze meanwhile fixed upon the sky-light, and a nervously gyrating forefinger raised high and brightly illuminated. The thought suggested was that he had a prompter on the roof to whom he was distressfully appealing to supply the true phrase. For Professor Gray the truth was in the top rather than the bottom of the well. Though sometimes long in coming it was the right thing when it came and clothed his thought properly. Sizing up the new professor, in our first days with him, as boys will do, some unconscionable dogs in our front row, a.s.suming an att.i.tude which Abraham Lincoln afterward made cla.s.sic, settled back in their chairs and rested their feet on the rail in front in a position higher than their heads. The professor, withdrawing his gaze suddenly from the sky-light, found himself confronted not by expectant faces but by a row of battered and muddy boot-soles. His face fell; his whirling forefinger, ceasing to gyrate, tilted like a lance in rest at the obnoxious cowhide parapet. "Those boots, young gentlemen, ah, those boots"; he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed forlornly, and the boots came down with mutinous clatter. Professor Gray soon established himself as a prime favourite among our lazy men, of whom there were too many. In calling us up he began with the A's, following down the cla.s.s in alphabetic regularity.

While Brooks was reciting, it was easy for Brown, sitting next, to open his book, and calculating narrowly the parallax, to hold it concealed below the rail, while he diligently conned the page following. In his turn he rose well-primed, and spouted glibly, and so on down the cla.s.s. Rumour went that our childlike professor declared he had never known anything like it. Nearly every man got the perfect mark. This was a fiction. The professor's idea was that we were old enough to know what was good for us, and ought to be above childish negligence and tricks. If some men saw no use in botany, he would not waste time in beating it into them. He left the blind and the sluggards in their wilful ignorance, but had generously helpful hands for all wiser ones who saw the value of tr.i.m.m.i.n.g their lamps. All such he would take to his garden personally to direct and inspire, and our better men felt all through their lives how much that meant. In general we soon came to feel and appreciate a most kindly influence as proceeding from him. I think we had no teacher whom we at the last regarded more affectionately or approached more closely; and many an indolent one was won to warm interest and diligence.

Those were the days when the older science was rocking to its foundations in a re-shaping at the hands of new and brilliant men.

Faraday, we might have heard of, but Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and the rest, were names all unknown, as were also the revolutionary ideas, the conservation and correlation of forces, the subst.i.tution of evolution in the scheme of the universe for the plan of special creations. Here all unconsciously we were in contact with a man who was in the thick of the new scientific movement, the friend and partner in their strivings of the daring new interpreters of the ways of G.o.d to men, and who was to have recognition as a specially effective apostle of the new dispensation. Abraham himself entertained his angel no more unawares than we, but gleams of fine radiance sometimes broke through even to our purblind perceptions. Once unfurling a quite too long and heedless pair of ears to what I supposed would be a dull technical deliverance, I found myself suddenly caught and wonderfully stimulated.

What [said Asa Gray] is the bright flame and vivid heat that is set free on your hearth when you kindle your piles of wood? It is the sunlight and sun-heat of a century ago. The beams were caught in the wilderness by the leaves of the trees; they were absorbed and stored in the trunks, and the light and heat day by day through many years was thus heaped up. When now combustion begins, it is simply a setting free of the radiance that was shed upon the forest many years ago. The noons of a time long past are making you comfortable in the wintry storm of the present. So when the anthracite glows in your grate, you feel the veritable sunbeams that were emitted aeons upon aeons ago upon the primeval world. It is the very light that was drunk in by those most ancient forests. It was held fast in the trunks, and when those faithful reservoirs in their turn were crushed and commingled and drenched until at last they lay under the earth as the coal beds, they nevertheless held fast this treasure. When you scratch your match you but unlock the h.o.a.rd, and the sunlight of primeval days, diminished by no particle, glows and warms once more.

This in substance was Asa Gray's introduction from which he went on to explain that in the progress of the universe no faintest throb of energy is lost. It might pa.s.s from form to form; heat might appear as a mode of motion, of weight, of elasticity, but no smallest unit perished. So the lecture flowed on into a luminous and comprehensive exposition of the great doctrine of the conservation and correlation of force. It was Asa Gray who brought us into touch with this new science just then announcing itself to the world. He was a co-worker and a compeer of the pioneers who at that moment were breaking a way for it, and it was our privilege to sit at the feet of a master.

In later years his fame spread wide. He was recognised as the leader in America in his special field, and in a cla.s.s with the best men of foreign lands. He was long a correspondent and special friend of Darwin, to the spread of whose doctrines he rendered great service.

The fact that religiously he adhered to the time-honoured evangelical tenets helped much in the war which the new science was forced to wage with the _odium theologic.u.m_. The new science, it must be said, perhaps has hardly yet made sure its footing. Are Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest clews with which we can face confidently the workings of the "roaring-gloom that weaves for G.o.d the garment we see him by"? But no doctrine is better accepted than that in some way Evolution and not Special Creations is the scheme of the world. Toward this acceptance Asa Gray helped powerfully, a champion always bold, humane, broad-minded. We used to laugh about the prompter he seemed to have at the top of the light-well in the sky-light in Holden Chapel.

In a deeper sense than we knew the good man received his prompting from the clear upper sky.

A naturalist who sixty years ago had, and perhaps still has, a much wider fame than Asa Gray was Louis Aga.s.siz. He had come a few years before from Europe, a man in his prime, of great fame. He was strikingly handsome, with a dome-like head under flowing black locks, large dark, mobile eyes set in features strong and comely, and with a well-proportioned stalwart frame. At the moment his prestige was greater, perhaps, than that of any other Harvard professor. His knowledge seemed almost boundless. His glacial theory had put him among the geological chiefs, and as to animated nature he had ordered and systematised, from the lowest plant-forms up to the crown of creation, the human being. Abroad we knew he was held to be an adept in the most difficult fields and now in his new environment he was pushing his investigations with pa.s.sionate zeal. But the boys found in him points on which a laugh could be hung. As he strode homeward from his walks in the outer fields or marshes, we eyed him gingerly, for who could tell what he might have in his pockets? Turtles, tadpoles, snakes, any old monster might be there, and queer stories prevailed of the menagerie which, hung up, and forgotten in the professor's dressing-room, crept out and sought asylum in the beds, shoes, and hats of the household. Before the resulting consternation, masculine and feminine, he was always apologetic. He was on the friendliest terms with things ill-reputed, even abhorrent, and could not understand the qualms of the delicate. He was said to have held up once, in all innocence, before a cla.s.s of school-girls a wriggling snake. The shrieks and confusion brought him to a sense of what he had done. He apologised elaborately, the foreign peculiarity he never lost running through his confusion. "Poor girls, I vill not do it again.

Next time I vill bring in a nice, clean leetle feesh." Aga.s.siz took no pleasure in shocking his cla.s.s; on the contrary he was most anxious to engage and hold them. So too, if his audience was made up from people of the simplest. In fact, for each he exerted his powers as generously as when addressing a company of savants. He always kindled as he spoke, and with a marvellous magnetism communicated his glow to those who listened. I have seen him stand before his cla.s.s holding in his hand the claw of a crustacean. In his earnestness it seemed to be for him the centre of the creation, and he made us all share his belief.

Indeed, he convinced us. Running back from it in an almost infinite series was the many-ordered life adhering at last and scarcely distinguishable from the inorganic matter to which it clung. Forward from it again ran the series not less long and complicated which fulfilled itself at last in the brain and soul of man. What he held in his hand was a central link. His colour came and went, his eye danced and his tones grew deep and tremulous, as he dwelt on the illimitable chain of being. With a few strokes on the blackboard, he presented graphically the most intricate variations. He felt the sublimity of what he was contemplating, and we glowed with him from the contagion of his fervour. I have never heard his equal as an expounder of the deep things of nature. He gloried in the exercise of his power, though hampered by poverty. "I have no time to make money," he cried. He sought no t.i.tle but that of teacher. To do anything else was only to misuse his gift. In his desk he was an inspirer, but hardly more so than in private talk. I recall walks we took with him to study natural objects and especially the striated rocks, which, as he had detected, bore plain evidence that the configuration of the region had been shaped by glaciers. He was charmingly affable, encouraging our questions, and unwearied in his demonstration. "Professor," I said once, "you teach us that in creation things rise from high to higher in the vast series until at last we come to man. Why stop with man?

why not conclude that as man surpa.s.ses what went before, so he in turn will be surpa.s.sed and supplanted by a being still superior;--and so on and on?" I well recall the solemnity of his face as he replied that I was touching upon the deepest things, not to be dealt with in an afternoon ramble. He would only say then that there could be nothing higher than a man with his spirit.

Whether Aga.s.siz was as broad-minded as he was high-minded may be argued. The story ran that when the foundations of the Museum of Comparative Zoology were going on in Divinity Avenue, a theological professor encountering the scientist among the shadows the latter was invading, courteously bade him welcome. He hoped the old Divinity Hall would be a good neighbour to the pile rising opposite. "Yes," was the bluff reply, "and I hope to see the time when it will be turned into a dormitory for my scientific students." They were quickly spoken, unmeditated words without intention of rudeness, but wrapped in his specialty he was rather careless as to what he might shoulder out.

Again, we had in our company a delicate, nervous fellow who turned out to be a spiritualistic medium, and who was soon subjected to an investigation in which professors took part, which was certainly rough and ready. Aga.s.siz speedily came to the conclusion that the young man was an impostor and deserved no mercy. Some of us felt that the determination was hasty. There was a possibility of honest self-deception; and then who could say that the mysteries had been fathomed that involved the play of the psychic forces? Possibly a calmer and more candid mood might have befitted the investigation.

At any rate in these later days such a mood has been maintained by inquirers like William James and the Society for Psychical Research.

These are straws, but it is hardly a straw that when Darwinism emerged upon the world, winning such speedy and almost universal adherence among scientific men and revolutionising in general the thought of the world as to the method of creation, Aga.s.siz stood almost solitary among authorities rejecting evolution and clinging to the doctrine of a special calling into being of each species. His stand against the new teaching was definite and bold, but can it be called broad-minded?

This is but the limitation that makes human a greatness which the world regards with thorough and affectionate reverence. Fortunate are those in whose memories live the voice and countenance of Louis Aga.s.siz.

Those whose privilege it was to know both father and son will be slow to admit that the elder Aga.s.siz was the greater man. Alexander (to his intimates he was always, affectionately, Alex), was a teacher only transiently, and I believe never before a cla.s.s showed the enkindling power which in the father was so marked a gift. His attainments, however, were probably not less great, and it remains to be seen whether his discoveries were not as epoch-making. He possessed, moreover, a versatility which his father never showed (perhaps because he never took time to show it), standing as a brilliant figure among financiers and captains of industry. Finally, in a high sense, Alexander was a philanthropist, and his benefactions were no more munificent than they were wisely applied; for he watched well his generous hand, guiding the flow into channels where it might most effectually revive and enrich. While possibly in the case of the elder Aga.s.siz, the recognition of truth was sometimes unduly circ.u.mscribed, that could never be said of Alexander. He was eminently broad-minded, estimating with just candour whatever might be advanced in his own field, and outside of his field, entering with sympathetic interest into all that life might present.

I recall him first on a day soon after our entrance into college in 1851. A civic celebration was to take place in Boston, and the Harvard students were to march in the procession. That day I first heard _Fair Harvard_, sonorously rendered by the band at the head of our column, as we formed on the Beacon Street mall before the State House. A boy of sixteen, dressed in gray, came down the steps to take his place in our cla.s.s--a handsome fellow, brown-eyed, and dark-haired, trimly built, and well-grown for his years. His face had a foreign air, and when he spoke a peculiarity marked his speech. This he never lost, but it was no imperfection. Rather it gave distinction to his otherwise perfect English. In the years of our course, we met daily. He was a good general scholar but with a preference from the first for natural science and mathematics. He matured into handsome manhood, and as an athlete was among the best. He was a master of the oar, not dropping it on graduation, but long a familiar figure on the Charles. Here incidentally he left upon the University a curious and lasting mark. The crew one day were exercising bare-headed on the Back Bay, when encountering stress of weather, Aga.s.siz was sent up into the city to find some proper head-gear. He presently returned with a package of handkerchiefs of crimson, which so demonstrated their convenience and played a part on so many famous occasions, that crimson became the Harvard colour.

Alexander was soon absorbed in the whirl of life, and to what purpose he worked I need not here detail. The story of the Calumet and Hecla Company is a kind of commercial romance which the harshest critics of American business life may read with pleasure. At the same time Aga.s.siz was only partially and transiently a business-man, returning always with haste from the mine and the counting-room to the protracted scientific researches in which his heart mainly lay. His voyages in the interest of science were many and long. He studied not so much the sh.o.r.es as the sea itself. Oceanographer is the term perhaps by which he may best be designated. By deep sea soundings he mapped the vast beds over which the waters roll and reached an intimacy with the life of its most profound abysses. Sitting next him at a cla.s.s dinner, an affair of dress-suits, baked meats, and cigars at the finish, I found his talk took one far away from the prose of the thing. He was charming in conversation, and he set forth at length his theory as to the work of the coral insects, formed after long study of the barrier reefs and atolls of remote seas. His ideas were subversive of those of Darwin, with whom he disputed the matter before Darwin died. They are now well-known and I think accepted, though unfortunately he died before setting them forth in due order. They are revolutionary in their character as to the origin of formations that enter largely into the crust of the earth. In this field he stood as originator and chief. He gave me glimpses of the wonderful indeed, as we cracked our almonds and sipped the sherbet, his rich voice and slightly foreign accent running at my ear as we sat under the banquet lights.

Though oceanography was his special field, his tastes and attainments were comprehensive and he was a man of repute in many ways. He was a trained and skilled engineer and mathematician, and an adept in the most various branches of natural science. At another cla.s.s dinner, when I was so fortunate as to sit beside him, his interest in botany came out as he spoke of the enjoyment he took in surveying from the roof of the Museum of Comparative Zoology the trees of Cambridge, the ma.s.ses of foliage here and there appearing from that point in special beauty. I spoke of the paper just read by Francis Darwin, the son of Charles, before the British a.s.sociation, emphasising the idea that the life of plants and animals differs not in kind but only in degree.

Plants may have memory, perhaps show pa.s.sion, predatory instincts, or rudimentary intelligence. The plant-world is therefore part and parcel of animated nature. Aga.s.siz announced with real fervour his adherence to that belief and cited interesting facts in its support. Subtle links binding plant and animal reveal themselves everywhere to investigation. In evolution from the primeval monads, or whatever starting-points there were, the fittest always survived as the outpoured life flowed abundantly along the million lines of development. There was a brotherhood between man and not only the zoophyte, but still further down, even with the ultimate cell in which organisation can first be traced, only faintly distinguishable from the azoic rock on which it hangs.

As he talked I thought of the ample s.p.a.ces of his Museum where the whole great scheme is made manifest to the eye, the structure of man, then the slow gradation downward, the immense series of flowers and plants counterfeited in gla.s.s continuing the line unbroken, down to the ultimate lichen, all but part and parcel of the ledge to which it clings.

My tastes were not in the direction of mathematics or natural science, and it was not until our later years that we came into close touch. In the hospice of the Grimsel, in the heart of the Alps, as I sat down to dinner after a day of hard walking, I saw my cla.s.smate in a remote part of the room with his wife and children and a group of Swiss friends. I determined not to intrude, but as the dinner ended, coming from his place he sought me out. "I heard your voice," he said, "and knew you were here before I saw you." We chatted genially. That day, he said, he had visited the site of his father's hut on the Aar glacier, where the observations were made on which was based the glacial theory. On that visit he had, as a small boy, been carried up in a basket on the back of a guide. He had not been there since until that day. He was that night in the environment into which he had been born, and a.s.sumed toward me the att.i.tude of a host making at home a stranger guest. To my question as to how a transient pa.s.ser like myself could best see a great ice river, he replied, "Climb to-morrow the Aeggisch-horn, and look down from there upon the Aletsch glacier.

You will have under your eye all the more interesting and important phenomena relating to the matter." We parted next morning. I had enjoyed a great privilege, for he was the man of all men to meet in such a place,--a feeling deepened a day or two later, when I looked down from the peak he had indicated upon this wide-stretching glacier below.

As age drew on he mellowed well. Perhaps sympathy with men and things outside his special walk was no stronger than in earlier years, but it had readier expression. I heard from him this good story. President Eliot was once showing about the university a multimillionaire and his wife who had the good purpose to endow a great school of learning in the West. Having made the survey, they stood in Memorial Hall, about to say good-bye. "Well, Mr. Eliot," said the wife, "How much money have you invested?" Mr. Eliot stated to her the estimated value of the university a.s.sets. The lady turning to her husband, exclaimed, with a touch of the feeling that money will buy everything, "Oh, husband, we can do better than that." Said Mr. Eliot, with a wave of the hand toward the ancient portraits on the walls: "Madame, we have one thing which money cannot buy,--nearly three centuries of devotedness!" There is fine appreciation of a precious possession in this remark. In other ways Harvard may be surpa.s.sed. Other inst.i.tutions may easily have more money, more students. As able men may be in other faculties possibly (I will admit even this) there may be elsewhere better football. But that through eight generations there has been in the hearts of the best men, a constant all-absorbing devotion to the inst.i.tution, is a thing for America unique, and which cannot be taken away. How stimulating is this to a n.o.ble loyalty in these later generations!

The old college is a thing to be watchfully and tenderly shielded. As Alexander told me the story, I felt in his manner and intonation that the three centuries of devotedness had had great influence with him.

As John Harvard had been the first of the liberal givers, so he was the last, and I suppose the greatest. The money value of his gifts is very large, but who will put a value upon the labour, the watchfulness, the expert guidance exercised by such a man, unrequited and almost without intermission throughout a long life! His fine nature, no doubt, prompted the consecration, but the old devotedness spurred him to emulation of those who had gone before.

In 1909 I enjoyed through Aga.s.siz a great pleasure. He invited me to his house where I found gathered a company of his friends, many of them men of eminence. He had just returned from his journey in East Africa, during which he had penetrated far into the interior, studying with his usual diligence the natural history of the regions. He entertained us with an informal talk beautifully and profusely ill.u.s.trated by photographs. I have said that he did not possess, or at any rate, never showed his father's power of kindling speech. So far as I know he never addressed large popular audiences. Nevertheless to a circle of scientific specialists, or people intelligent in a general way, he could present a subject charmingly, in clear, calm, fluent speech. On this occasion he was at his best, and it was a pleasure indeed to have the marvels of that freshly-opened land described to us by the man who of all men perhaps was best able to cope with the story. I listened with delight and awe. He was an old man crowned with the highest distinctions. I thought of the young handsome boy I had seen coming down in his grey suit into the Beacon Street mall, while the band played Fair Harvard. On the threshold I shook his hand and looked into his dark, kindly eyes. I turned away in the darkness and saw him no more.

CHAPTER X

AT HAPHAZARD

In 1887, in pleasant June weather I left St. Louis with my family on the capacious river-packet _Saint Paul_, for a trip up-stream to the city for which the boat was named. The flood was at the full as we ploughed on, stopping at landings on either side, the reaches between presenting long perspectives of summer beauty. We paused in due course at a little Iowa town, and among the pa.s.sengers who took the boat here were two men who excited our attention at the landing. One was a tall handsome fellow in early manhood, well-dressed and mannered, completely blind. The other was his companion, a rather dishevelled figure with neglected beard and hair setting off a face that looked out somewhat helplessly into a world strange to it, an attire of loose white wool, plainly made by some tailor who knew nothing of recent fashion-plates. A close-fitting cap of the same material surmounted his head. The attire was whole and neat, but the air of the man was slouchy and bespoke one who must have lately come from the outskirts into the life of America. The young blindman at once aroused earnest sympathy. Of the other some one remarked, "Plainly a globe-trotting Englishman, who has lost his Baedeker and by chance got in here."

Presently the boat was on its way, and as I sat facing the changing scene, I heard a shuffling, hesitating step behind, and a drawling somewhat uncertain voice asked me about the country. I replied that it was my first trip and I was ignorant. Turning full upon the querist, no other than the globe-trotter, I said: "You are an Englishman I see.

I was in England last year. I have spent some time in London, and I know other parts of your country." A conversation followed which soon became to me interesting. My companion had education and intelligence, and before the afternoon ended we were agreeably in touch. He handed me his card on which was engraved the name, "Mr. William Grey." I told him I was a Harvard man, a professor in Washington University, St.

Louis. He was of Exeter College, Oxford, and for some years had been a professor in Codrington College, Barbadoes, in the West Indies, whence he had lately come. To my natural surprise that he should be so far astray, he said he had been visiting a fellow Exeter man, a clergyman of the English Church, who was the rector of an Iowa parish. It further developed that his young blind companion belonged to a family in the parish, and that Mr. Grey had good-heartedly a.s.sumed the care of him during an outing on the river.

A trip from St. Louis to St. Paul by river is longer now than a trip across the Atlantic. I was nearly a week in my new companionship, and acquaintance grew and deepened fast. The young blindman, whose manners were agreeable, became a general favourite, and Mr. Grey and I found we had much in common. I mentioned to him that my errand in England the year before had been to find material for a life of Young Sir Henry Vane, the statesman and martyr of the English Commonwealth, and in his young days a governor of the province of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay.

This touched in him a responsive chord. He was familiar with the period and the character. He was a friend of Shorthouse whose novel, _John Inglesant_ was a widely-read book of those days. He had helped Shorthouse in his researches for the book, and knew well the story of Charles I., and his friends and foes. He was himself a staunch Churchman, but mentioned with some pleasure that his name appeared among the Non-conformists. A st.u.r.dy n.o.ble of those days was Lord Grey of Groby, who opposed the King to the last, standing at the right hand of the redoubtable Colonel Pride at the famous "Pride's Purge," pointing out to him the Presbyterians whom the Ironside was to turn out of Parliament, in the thick of the crisis. To my inquiry as to whether Lord Grey of Groby was an ancestor, he was reticent, merely saying that the name was the same. I had begun to surmise that my new friend was allied with the Greys who in so many periods of English history have borne a famous part. Some years before, while sojourning in a little town on the Ohio River, a stroll carried me to a coal-mine in the neighbourhood. As I peered down two hundred feet into the dark shaft, a bluff, peremptory voice called to me to look out for my head.

I drew back in time to escape the cage as it descended with a group of miners from a higher plane to the lower deeps. I thanked my bluff friend, who had saved my head from a b.u.mp. A pleasant acquaintance followed which led to his taking me down into the mine, a thrilling experience. He was an adventurous Englishman who had put money into a far-away enterprise, and come with his wife and children to take care of it. His wife was a lady well-born, a sister of Sir George Grey, twice governor of New Zealand, and at the time High Commissioner and governor of Cape Colony, one of the most interesting of the great English nation-makers of the South Seas. I came to know the lady, and naturally followed the career of her brother, who earned a n.o.ble reputation. Later I corresponded with him, and received from him his portrait and books. Referring to Sir George Grey in my talk with Mr.

William Grey, I found that he knew him well and not long before, in a voyage of which he had made many into many seas, had visited New Zealand, and been a guest of Sir George Grey at his island-home in the harbour of Auckland. Was he related to Sir George? was my natural query. Again there was reticence. The name was the same, but the Greys were numerous.

The journey wore on. The resource of the steamer's company was to sit on the upper deck, watch the swollen river with its waifs of uprooted trees and the banks green with the summer, chatting ourselves into intimacy. The young blindman made good and very good, and his guardian, while keeping a lookout on his charge from under his well-worn traveller's cap, which I now knew had sheltered its owner in tropic hurricanes and icy Arctic blasts, discussed with me matters various and widely related. Nearing our journey's end, we sat in the moonlight, the Mississippi opening placidly before us between hazy hills. We had grown to be chums, and next morning we were to part. It was a time for confidences. "Well," said Mr. Grey, "I am going to get a good look at America, then I mean to return home and go into Parliament." I suggested there might be difficulties about that.

English elections were uncertain, and how could he be at all sure that any const.i.tuency would want him. "Ah," said he, this time no longer reticent. "I am going into the House of Lords." "Indeed," said I in surprise, "and who are you really, Mr. William Grey?" At last he was outspoken. He was heir to the earldom of Stamford, his uncle the present earl, a man past eighty, childless, and in infirm health, must soon lay down the t.i.tle. He was preparing himself for the responsibilities of the high position and believed it well to make a study of America. His father, a younger son, had been a clergyman in Canada, and he, though with an Oxford training, knew the world outside of England better than the old home. His direct ancestor was Lord Grey of Groby, whose father, an earl of Stamford, had been a Parliamentary commander in the years of the Civil War, and in the century before that, a flower of the house had been the Lady Jane Grey, who had perished in her youth on the scaffold, a possible heir to the English crown. So this _outre_ personage, good-heartedly helping the blindman to an outing, and in a shy apologetic way getting into touch with an environment strange to him, was a high-born n.o.bleman fitting himself for his dignities.

I had before invited Mr. Grey to visit me in St. Louis, for his seeming helplessness appealed to me from the first. He had met some hard rebuffs in his American contacts. I thought I might aid him in making his way. Returning in the autumn to my home, I heard from Mr.

Grey that he was coming to be my guest, and in due time he arrived. I missed him at the station, but he presently appeared at our door in an express-waggon, sitting on the seat with the driver, in the midst of his belongings. He spent a week with us in the first American home he had known, and we found him an amiable and un.o.btrusive gentleman.

He was a vigorous walker and explored the city well. His listless, seemingly inattentive eyes somehow scanned everything, and he judged well what he witnessed. He was an accomplished scholar and had a quiet humour. A little daughter half-playfully and half-wilfully, announced her intention to follow her own pleasure in a certain case. "Milicent is a Hedonist," said the guest, and the Oxford scholar brought Aristippus and Epicurus into odd conjunction with a Mississippi Valley breakfast-table. He laid aside his white woollen suit, but his attire remained unconventional, not to say _outre_. Even the wrinkled dress-suit in which he appeared at dinner, I think was the achievement of a tailor in the island of Barbadoes. His opera-hat was a wonder. He was, or was soon to be, a belted earl, but his belt only appeared on his pajamas, raiment of which I heard then for the first time. It had early appeared in our intercourse that the main interest of Mr. Grey lay in humane and religious work. He also was a devoted member of the Church of England. On Sunday morning we started early for the leading Episcopal Church but on the way he inquired as to the place of worship of the negro congregation of that faith. I confessed my ignorance of it, but he had in some way ascertained it, and I presently found myself following his lead down a rather squalid street where at last we came to the humble temple. Instead of hearing the bishop, a famous and eloquent man, he preferred to sit on a bare bench in the obscure little meeting-house, where he fraternised cordially with the dusky company we found there. He was more interested in our charities than in our politics and business, and in his quiet way during the week learned the story well. I introduced him to Southern friends who gave him letters to persons in the South. Provided with these he bade us good-bye at last, and went far and wide through what had been the Confederacy. He visited Jefferson Davis and many soldiers and politicians of note, getting at first-hand their point of view. I also gave him letters to some eminent men in the East, which he presented, meeting with a good reception. He made a wide and shrewd study of the United States, and I am glad to think I helped him. When I met him he was unfriended and without credentials, and his singularities were exposing him to some inconvenient jostling in our rough world.

I opened some doors to him through which he pushed his way into much that was best worth seeing in American life. An old friend, a radical man of letters, wrote me afterwards that he enjoyed Mr. Grey, and he thought Mr. Grey enjoyed him although he believed that if he had been a pauper, a criminal, or even a bishop, Mr. Grey would have enjoyed him much more.

He returned to England and did not forget me, writing from time to time how his affairs progressed. Soon he entered into his own, the earldom of Stamford, finding about the same time his countess in an English vicarage. In the House of Lords he was not prominent, though the papers occasionally mentioned brief addresses by him. His main interest continued to be charitable work. He was a lay-preacher, and worked much in the east end of London, throwing the weight of his culture and high position into alleviating ignorance and poverty. He sent me interesting literature relating to the efforts of well-placed men and women to carry into slums and hovels sweetness and light.

In due time a daughter was born to him, whom he named Jane Grey; and later a son, Lord Grey of Groby. I saw once in the London Graphic, or perhaps in the Ill.u.s.trated News, charming pictures of these children with their interesting historic names. Though rigidly a Churchman he was not narrow. Lord Stamford sent me a handsome picture of himself, to which is affixed his signature as an earl and an elaborate seal. In an accompanying note he wrote that the seal was a careful facsimile of the one which an ancestor of his had affixed to the death-warrant of Charles I. He seemed to take pride in the fact that his forbear had borne a part in the ancient Non-conformist strivings. He came to America more than once afterward, as a delegate to charitable and peace Congresses. My dear friend Robert Treat Paine, President of the Peace Society and eminent philanthropist of Boston, knew him well and esteemed him highly--and he was the fellow of workers like him.

It is a picturesque moment in my life that I in this way came into a.s.sociation with a n.o.bleman of the bluest blood. To outward appearance as I stumbled upon him so unexpectedly, he seemed effete. His odd shuffle and limp whiskers were dundrearily suggestive of a personality a bit mildewed. But I felt that what inept.i.tude there was, was only superficial; good, strong manhood lay underneath. His death took place some years since.

Burke's _Peerage_ states that the family was enn.o.bled by Richard Coeur de Lion, and has maintained itself in a high place for eight centuries. Privilege is a bough of the social tree from which we expect mere dead sea-fruit rather than a wholesome yield, but now and then the product holds something better than ashes. As we trace this stock through the ages, apples of Sodom, no doubt, will be found in abundance, but now and then it flowers into heroic manhood and lovely womanhood. My chance comrade of the _St. Paul_ was a refined, high-purposed man, certainly a product of the worthier kind, and I am glad to count among my friends, William Grey, Ninth Earl of Stamford.