The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees Part 10

The first house erected in Charlestown after the destruction of the village by fire in 1775 (the coup d'etat which immediately followed the battle of Bunker Hill, it will be remembered), is that which is here given as the birthplace of Samuel Finley Breese Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph. The house is still standing at 203 Main Street, and in the front chamber of the second story, on the right of the front door of the entrance, visitors still pause to render tribute to the memory of the babe that there drew his first breath on April 27, 1791.

[Ill.u.s.tration: EDES HOUSE, BIRTHPLACE OF PROFESSOR MORSE, CHARLESTOWN, Ma.s.s.]

It was, however, quite by accident that the house became doubly famous, for it was during the building of the parsonage, Pastor Morse's proper home, that his little son came to gladden his life. Reverend Jedediah Morse became minister of the First Parish Church on April 30, 1789, the very date of Washington's inauguration in New York as President of the United States, and two weeks later married a daughter of Judge Samuel Breese, of New York. Shortly afterward it was determined to build a parsonage, and during the construction of this dwelling Doctor Morse accepted the hospitality of Mr. Thomas Edes, who then owned the "oldest"

house. And work on the parsonage being delayed beyond expectation, Mrs.

Morse's little son was born in the Edes house.

Apropos of the brief residence of Doctor Morse in this house comes a quaint letter from Reverend Jeremy Belknap, the staid old doctor of divinity, and the founder of the Ma.s.sachusetts Historical Society, which shows that girls over a hundred years ago were quite as much interested in young unmarried ministers as nice girls ought ever to be. Two or three months before the settlement of Mr. Morse in Charlestown, Doctor Belknap wrote to his friend, Ebenezer Hazard, of New York, who was a relative of Judge Breese:

"You said in one of your late letters that probably Charlestown people would soon have to build a house for Mr. Morse. I let this drop in a conversation with a daughter of Mr. Carey, and in a day or two it was all over Charlestown, and the girls who had been setting their caps for him are chagrined. I suppose it would be something to Mr. Morse's advantage in point of bands and handkerchiefs, if this report could be contradicted; but if it cannot, oh, how heavy will be the disappointment. When a young clergyman settles in such a town as Charlestown, there is as much looking out for him as there is for a thousand-dollar prize in a lottery; and though the girls know that but one can have him, yet 'who knows but I may be that one?'"[10]

Doctor Morse's fame has been a good deal obscured by that of his distinguished son, but he seems none the less to have been a good deal of a man, and it is perhaps no wonder that the feminine portion of a little place like Charlestown looked forward with decided interest to his settling among them. We can even fancy that the girls of the sewing society studied geography with ardour when they learned who was to be their new minister. For geography was Doctor Morse's pa.s.sion; he was, indeed, the Alexis Frye of his period. This interest in geography is said to have been so tremendous with the man that once being asked by his teacher at a Greek recitation where a certain verb was found, he replied, "On the coast of Africa." And while he was a tutor at Yale the want of geographies there induced him to prepare notes for his pupils, to serve as text-books, which he eventually printed.

Young Morse seconded his father's pa.s.sion for geography by one as strongly marked for drawing, and the blank margin of his Virgil occupied far more of his thoughts than the text. The inventor came indeed only tardily to discover in which direction his real talent lay. All his youth he worshipped art and followed (at considerable distance) his beloved mistress. His penchant for painting, exhibited in much the same manner as Allston's, his future master, did not meet with the same encouragement.

A caricature (founded upon some fracas among the students at Yale), in which the faculty were burlesqued, was seized during Morse's student days, handed to President Dwight, and the author, who was no other than our young friend, called up. The delinquent received a severe lecture upon his waste of time, violation of college laws, and filial disobedience, without exhibiting any sign of contrition; but when at length Doctor Dwight said to him, "Morse, you are no painter; this is a rude attempt, a complete failure," he was touched to the quick, and could not keep back the tears.

The canvas, executed by Morse at the age of nineteen, of the landing of the Pilgrims, which may be seen at the Charlestown City Hall, is certainly not a masterpiece. Yet the lad was determined to learn to paint, and to this end accompanied Allston to Europe, where he became a pupil of West, and, it is said, also of Copley.

West had become the foremost painter of his time in England when our ambitious young artist was presented to him, but from the beginning he took a great interest in the Charlestown lad, and showed him much attention. Once in after years Morse related to a friend this most interesting anecdote of his great master: "I called upon Mr. West at his house in Newman Street one morning, and in conformity to the order given to his servant Robert always to admit Mr. Leslie and myself even if he was engaged in his private studies, I was shown into his studio.

"As I entered a half-length portrait of George III. stood before me on an easel, and Mr. West was sitting with his back toward me copying from it upon canvas. My name having been mentioned to him, he did not turn, but pointing with the pencil he had in his hand to the portrait from which he was copying, he said, 'Do you see that picture, Mr. Morse?'

"'Yes, sir,' I said, 'I perceive it is the portrait of the king.'

"'Well,' said Mr. West, 'the king was sitting to me for that portrait when the box containing the American Declaration of Independence was handed to him.'

"'Indeed,' I answered; 'and what appeared to be the emotions of the king? What did he say?'

"'His reply,' said Mr. West, 'was characteristic of the goodness of his heart: "If they can be happier under the government they have chosen than under me, I shall be happy."'"[11]

Morse returned to Boston in the autumn of 1815, and there set up a studio. But he was not too occupied in painting to turn a hand to invention, and we find him the next winter touring New Hampshire and Vermont trying to sell to towns and villages a fire-engine pump he had invented, while seeking commissions to paint portraits at fifteen dollars a head. It was that winter that he met in Concord, New Hampshire, Miss Lucretia P. Walker, whom he married in the autumn of 1818, and whose death in February, 1825, just after he had successfully fulfilled a liberal commission to paint General Lafayette, was the great blow of his young manhood.

The National Academy of Design Morse helped to found in New York in 1826, and of this inst.i.tution he was first president. About the same time we find him renewing his early interest in electrical experiments.

A few years later he is sailing for Europe, there to execute many copying commissions. And on his return from this stay abroad the idea of the telegraph suggested itself to him.

Of the exact way in which Morse first conceived the idea of making electricity the means of conveying intelligence, various accounts have been given, the one usually accepted being that while on board the packet-ship _Sully_, a fellow pa.s.senger related some experiments he had witnessed in Paris with the electro-magnet, a recital which made such an impression upon one of his auditors that he walked the deck the whole night. Professor Morse's own statement was that he gained his knowledge of the working of the electro-magnet while attending the lectures of Doctor J. Freeman Dana, then professor of chemistry in the University of New York, lectures which were delivered before the New York Atheneum.

"I witnessed," says Morse, "the effects of the conjunctive wires in the different forms described by him in his lectures, and exhibited to his audience. The electro-magnet was put in action by an intense battery; it was made to sustain the weight of its armature, when the conjunctive wire was connected with the poles of the battery, or the circuit was closed; and it was made to 'drop its load' upon opening the circuit."

Yet after the inventor had made his discovery he had the greatest difficulty in getting a chance to demonstrate its worth. Heartsick with despondency, and with his means utterly exhausted, he finally applied to the Twenty-seventh Congress for aid to put his invention to the test of practical ill.u.s.tration, and his pet.i.tion was carried through with a majority of only two votes! These two votes to the good were enough, however, to save the wonderful discovery, perhaps from present obscurity, and with the thirty thousand dollars appropriated by Congress Morse stretched his first wires from Washington to Baltimore--wires, it will be noted, because the principle of the ground circuit was not then known, and only later discovered by accident. So that a wire to go and another to return between the cities was deemed necessary by Morse to complete his first circuit. The first wire was of copper.

The first message, now in the custody of the Connecticut Historical Society, was dictated by Miss Annie G. Ellsworth, and the words of it were "What hath G.o.d wrought?" The telegraph was at first regarded with superst.i.tious dread in some sections of the country. In a Southern State a drought was attributed to its occult influences, and the people, infatuated with the idea, levelled the wires to the ground. And so common was it for the Indians to knock off the insulators with their rifles in order to gratify their curiosity in regard to the "singing cord," that it was at first extremely difficult to keep the lines in repair along the Pacific Railway.

To the man who had been so poor that he had had a very great struggle to provide bread for his three motherless children, came now success. The impecunious artist was liberally rewarded for his clever invention, and in 1847 he married for his second wife Miss Sarah E. Griswold, of Poughkeepsie, the daughter of his cousin. She was twenty-five when they were married, and he fifty-six, but they lived very happily together on the two-hundred acre farm he had bought near Poughkeepsie, and it was there that he died at the age of seventy-two, full of honours as an inventor, and loving art to the end.

Even after he became a great man, Professor Morse, it is interesting to learn, cherished his fondness for the house in which he was born, and one of his last visits to Charlestown was on the occasion when he took his young daughter to see the old place. And that same day, one is a bit amused to note, he took her also to the old parsonage, then still standing, in what is now Harvard Street, between the city hall and the church--and there pointed out to her with pride some rude sketches he had made on the wall of his sleeping-room when still a boy. So, though it is as an inventor we remember and honour Samuel Finley Breese Morse to-day, it was as a painter that he wished first, last, and above all to be famous. But in the realm of the talents as elsewhere man proposes and G.o.d disposes.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 10: Drake's "Historic Fields and Mansions of Middles.e.x."

Little, Brown & Co., publishers.]

[Footnote 11: Beacon Biographies: S. F. B. Morse, by John Trowbridge; Small, Maynard & Co.]

WHERE THE "BROTHERS AND SISTERS" MET

No single house in all Ma.s.sachusetts has survived so many of the vicissitudes of fickle fortune and carried the traditions of a glorious past up into the realities of a prosperous and useful present more successfully than has Fay House, the present home of Radcliffe College, Cambridge. The central portion of the Fay House of to-day dates back nearly a hundred years, and was built by Nathaniel Ireland, a prosperous merchant of Boston. It was indeed a mansion to make farmer-folk stare when, with its tower-like bays, running from ground to roof, it was, in 1806, erected on the highroad to Watertown, the first brick house in the vicinity.

To Mr. Ireland did not come the good fortune of living in the fine dwelling his ambition had designed. A ship-blacksmith by trade, his prospects were ruined by the Jefferson Embargo, and he was obliged to leave the work of construction on his house unfinished and allow the place to pa.s.s, heavily mortgaged, into the hands of others. But the house itself and our story concerning it gained by Mr. Ireland's loss, for it now became the property of Doctor Joseph McKean (a famous Harvard instructor), and the rendezvous of that professor's college a.s.sociates and of the numerous friends of his young family. Oliver Wendell Holmes was among those who spent many a social evening here with the McKeans.

The next name of importance to be connected with Fay House was that of Edward Everett, who lived here for a time. Later Sophia Willard Dana, granddaughter of Chief Justice Dana, our first minister to Russia, kept a boarding and day school for young ladies in the house. Among her pupils were the sisters of James Russell Lowell, Mary Channing, the first wife of Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and members of the Higginson, Parkman, and Tuckerman families. Lowell himself, and Edmund Dana, attended here for a term as a special privilege. Sophia Dana was married in the house, August 22, 1827, by the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes, to Mr. George Ripley, with whom she afterward took an active part in the Brook Farm Colony, of which we are to hear again a bit later in this series. After Miss Dana's marriage, her school was carried on largely by Miss Elizabeth McKean--the daughter of the Doctor Joseph McKean already referred to--a young woman who soon became the wife of Doctor Joseph Worcester, the compiler of the dictionary.

Delightful reminiscences of Fay House have been furnished us by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who, as a boy, was often in and out of the place, visiting his aunt, Mrs. Channing, who lived here with her son, William Henry Channing, the well-known anti-slavery orator. Here Higginson, as a youth, used to listen with keenest pleasure, to the singing of his cousin, Lucy Channing, especially when the song she chose was, "The Mistletoe Hung on the Castle Wall," the story of a bride shut up in a chest. "I used firmly to believe," the genial colonel confessed to the Radcliffe girls, in reviving for them his memories of the house, "that there was a bride shut up in the walls of this house--and there may be to-day, for all I know."

For fifty years after June, 1835, the house was in the possession of Judge P. P. Fay's family. The surroundings were still country-like.

Cambridge Common was as yet only a treeless pasture, and the house had not been materially changed from its original shape and plan. Judge Fay was a jolly gentleman of the old school. A judge of probate for a dozen years, an overseer of Harvard College, and a pillar of Christ Church, he was withal fond of a well-turned story and a lover of good hunting, as well as much given to hospitality. Miss Maria Denny Fay, whose memory is now perpetuated in a Radcliffe scholarship, was the sixth of Judge Fay's seven children, and the one who finally became both mistress and owner of the estate. A girl of fourteen when her father bought the house, she was at the time receiving her young-lady education at the Convent of St. Ursula, where, in the vine-covered, red-brick convent on the summit of Charlestown, she learned, under the guidance of the nuns, to sing, play the piano, the harp, and the guitar, to speak French, and read Spanish and Italian. But her life on Mt. Benedict was suddenly terminated when the convent was burned. So she entered earlier than would otherwise have been the case upon the varied interests of her new and beautiful home. Here, in the course of a few years, we find her presiding, a gracious and lovely maiden, of whom the venerable Colonel Higginson has said: "I have never, in looking back, felt more grateful to any one than to this charming girl of twenty, who consented to be a neighbour to me, an awkward boy of seventeen, to attract me in a manner from myself and make me available to other people."

Very happy times were those which the young Wentworth Higginson, then a college boy, living with his mother at Vaughan House, was privileged to share with Maria Fay and her friends. Who of us does not envy him the memory of that Christmas party in 1841, when there were gathered in Fay House, among others, Maria White, Lowell's beautiful fiancee; Levi Thaxter, afterward the husband of Celia Thaxter; Leverett Saltonstall, Mary Story and William Story, the sculptors? And how pleasant it must have been to join in the famous charades of that circle of talented young people, to partake of refreshments in the quaint dining-room, and dance a Virginia reel and galop in the beautiful oval parlour which then, as to-day, expressed ideally the acme of charming hospitality!

What tales this same parlour might relate! How enchantingly it might tell, if it could speak, of the graceful Maria White, who, seated in the deep window, must have made an exquisite picture in her white gown, with her beautiful face shining in the moonlight while she repeated, in her soft voice, one of her own ballads, written for the "Brothers and Sisters," as this group of young people was called.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OVAL PARLOUR, FAY HOUSE, CAMBRIDGE, Ma.s.s.]

Of a more distinctly academic cast were some of the companies later a.s.sembled in this same room--Judge Story, Doctor Beck, President Felton, Professors Pierce, Lane, Child, and Lowell, with maybe Longfellow, listening to one of his own songs, or that strange figure, Professor Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, oddly ill at ease in his suit of dingy black. In his younger days he had been both pirate and priest, and he retained, as professor, some of his early habits--seldom being seated while he talked, and leaning against the door, shaking and fumbling his college keys as the monks shake their rosaries. Mr. Arthur Gilman has related in a charming article on Fay House, written for the _Harvard Graduates Magazine_ (from which, as from Miss Norris's sketch of the old place, printed in a recent number of the _Radcliffe Magazine_, many of the incidents here given are drawn), that Professor Sophocles was allowed by Miss Fay to keep some hens on the estate, pets which he had an odd habit of naming after his friends. When, therefore, some accomplishment striking and praiseworthy in a hen was related in company as peculiar to one or another of them, the professor innocently calling his animals by the name he had borrowed, the effect was apt to be startling.

During the latter part of Miss Fay's long tenancy of this house, she had with her her elder sister, the handsome Mrs. Greenough, a woman who had been so famous a beauty in her youth that, on the occasion of her wedding, Harvard students thronged the aisles and climbed the pews of old Christ Church to see her. The wedding receptions of Mrs. Greenough's daughter and granddaughter were held, too, in Fay House. This latter girl was the fascinating and talented Lily Greenough, who was later a favourite at the court of Napoleon and Eugenie, and who, after the death of her first husband, Mr. Charles Moulton, was married in this house to Monsieur De Hegermann Lindencrone, at that time Danish Minister to the United States, and now minister at Paris. Her daughter, Suzanne Moulton, who has left her name scratched with a diamond on one of the Fay House windows, is now the Countess Suzanne Raben-Levetzan of Nystel, Denmark.

In connection with the Fays' life in this house occurred one thing which will particularly send the building down into posterity, and will link for all time Radcliffe and Harvard traditions. For it was in the upper corner room, nearest the Washington Elm, that Doctor Samuel Gilman, Judge Fay's brother-in-law, wrote "Fair Harvard," while a guest in this hospitable home, during the second centennial celebration of the college on the Charles. Radcliffe girls often seem a bit triumphant as they point out to visitors this room and its facsimile copy of the famous song. Yet they have plenty of pleasant things of their own to remember.

Just one of these, taken at random from among the present writer's own memories of pretty happenings at Fay House, will serve: During Duse's last tour in this country, the famous actress came out one afternoon, as many a famous personage does, to drink a cup of tea with Mrs. Aga.s.siz in the stately old parlour, where Mrs. Whitman's famous portrait of the president of Radcliffe College vies in attractiveness with the living reality graciously presiding over the Wednesday afternoon teacups. As it happened, there was a scant attendance at the tea on this day of Duse's visit. She had not been expected, and so it fell out that some two or three girls who could speak French or Italian were privileged to do the honours of the occasion to the great actress whom they had long worshipped from afar. Duse was in one of her most charming moods, and she listened with the greatest attention to her young hostesses'

laboured explanations concerning the college and its ancient home.

The best of it all, from the enthusiastic girl-students' point of view, was, however, in the dark-eyed Italienne's mode of saying farewell. As she entered her carriage--to which she had been escorted by this little group--she took from her belt a beautiful bouquet of roses, camellias, and violets. And as the smart coachman flicked the impatient horses with his whip, Duse threw the girls the precious flowers. Those who caught a camellia felt, of course, especially delighted, for it was as the Dame aux Camellias that Duse had been winning for weeks the plaudits of admiring Boston. My own share of the largesse consisted of a few fresh, sweet violets, which I still have tucked away somewhere, together with one of the great actress's photographs that bears the date of the pleasant afternoon hour pa.s.sed with her in the parlour where the "Brothers and Sisters" met.

THE BROOK FARMERS

One of the weddings noted in our Fay House chapter was that of Sophia Dana to George Ripley, an event which was celebrated August 22, 1827, in the stately parlour of the Cambridge mansion, the ceremony being performed by the father of Oliver Wendell Holmes. The time between the date of their marriage and the year 1840, when Mr. and Mrs. Ripley "discovered" the milk-farm in West Roxbury, which was afterward to be developed through their efforts into the most remarkable socialistic experiment America has ever known, represented for the young people joined together in what is now the home of Radcliffe College some dozen years of quiet parsonage life in Boston.

The later years of George Ripley's life held for him a series of disappointments before which his courage and ideals never failed. When the young student left the Harvard Divinity School, he was appointed minister over a Unitarian parish which was gathered for him at the corner of Pearl and Purchase Streets, Boston. Here his ministrations went faithfully on, but inasmuch as his parishioners failed to take any deep interest in the social questions which seemed to him of most vital concern, he sent them, in the October of 1840, a letter of resignation, which they duly accepted, thus leaving Ripley free to enter upon the experiment so dear to him.