USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Fifty years of Boston; a memorial volume issued in commemoration of the tercentenary of 1930; 1880-1930, Pt. 1 > Part 2
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After Doctor Howe's death his work was carried on by Mr. Anagnos, his son-in-law. He was a Greek patriot who brought with him from Athens the spirit of ancient Greece, boundless enthusiasm and a love of all things beautiful. Enough cannot be said in praise of his work of building up the institution. His energy was tireless and his eloquence irresistible when he pleaded for books for the blind or a kindergarten for young blind children.
It was Mr. Anagnos who awakened my interest in the mythology of Hellas and the classical languages. He used to declare that I pronounced Greek words more distinctly than I did English words. I do not know about that, but I know that I love the ancient Greek language, and with it is associated in my mind Mr. Anagnos' vivid, friendly personality.
Mr. Edward E. Allen was head master of the boy's department at Perkins when I went to Boston and later became director of the institution. A descend- ant of a long line of distinguished New England educators, he carried out both Doctor Howe's and Mr. Anagnos' ideas, and supplemented them with many constructive ideas of his own. I doubt if there is a school for the blind in the world to approach that at Watertown, Massachusetts. The co-operation and generous support of the trustees of the Perkins Institution enabled Mr. Allen to build into stone beauty and joy-bringing possibilities for blind students.
Mr. Allen, realizing the importance to the blind of being able to handle objects they cannot see, increased the collection in the museum of natural history begun by Mr. Anagnos. He also enriched the reference library of information concerning the blind, which is of inestimable value to research workers.
The Harvard class to train teachers is Mr. Allen's work and its beneficent effect is felt throughout the land. Wherever there is a graduate from the Harvard class, there is hope of an intelligent fight against blindness. Forty-two languages are now understood in the class where Mr. Allen lectures, and when all the students who have applied for admission are admitted, many more countries will be represented.
Mr. Allen is now seventy years old. He has lived among us long enough to win the permanent affection and gratitude of the blind everywhere. His light burns far and bright in our darkness. A teacher in his inmost soul, he embodies the best qualities of Boston philanthrophy .*
In Boston it was my privilege to know and talk with men of genius. They opened their hearts to me and their conversation widened the world for me.
Only those who knew Phillips Brooks can appreciate the preciousness of his friendship. As a child I loved to sit on his knee, clasping his great hand with one of mine, while Miss Sullivan spelled into the other his beautiful words
* EDITORIAL NOTE .-- In July, 1931, Mr. Allen, who had resigned from his position as director, was succeeded by the Rev. Gabriel Farrell. Mr. Allen still conducts a class at the institution.
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about God and love and being good. The tenderness of his coneeption of God shed radiance on everything, like warm sunshine. His religion seemed to spring from an abundant joy of life. God and Heaven were here on earth. He thought of the Great Beyond simply as a more permanent, brighter life. Perhaps it was this confident eertainty of the nearness of God that made me deelare I had always known God but had forgotten His name. I never left Phillips Brooks without earrying away a fine thought that has deepened in meaning and beauty with the years.
Edward Everett Hale eame to see me on my eighth birthday. I remember well his interest in my rag doll, Naney. I told him she had been very ill and I must sit by the sofa and watch her all day. I loved him for the child-like spirit with which he entered into the situation, telling her stories to keep her quiet.
From that day to the day of his death I relied on Doetor Hale's friendship. He stood staunehly by Miss Sullivan and me in the trials and sorrows which eame to us in later years. He was never too busy to answer our letters or come to us when we needed his eounsel. He gave a personal touch to his letters to me by pricking his signature in braille.
One of my happiest memories of Doetor Hale is the day he came out to Wrentham and married my teacher and John Macy. I stood beside him during the ceremony, among the flowers and palms, with my hand on his arm, while he pronouneed the words that united my two dearest friends. I felt the strong eurrent of life in his lion-like frame - that inealeulable abundance of life, of faith, of adventure and passion which had vitalized and inspired millions of his fellowmen.
After learning to speak, I frequently visited Oliver Wendell Holmes, and in his library reeited for him "The Chambered Nautilus," "The Opening of the Piano" and "Dorothy Q.," which I had learned by heart. I would stand beside him as he sat in a great arm-ehair by a window looking out on the river Charles, or by an open fire when it was cool, and haltingly repeat the last poem I had learned. The tapping of his hand on iny arm was like an accompanying musie and gave me eonfidenee.
I liked the smell of printer's ink and leather which filled the room, and the luseious "feel" of vellum and moroeeo-bound books which Doetor Holmes put into my hands. I thought all the books that had ever been written must be in that library and that this was Keats's dream of "a very pleasant life." When I expressed this idea, Doetor Holmes got up, went to a book-ease and took down a volume which he said contained Keats's dream. He read aloud:
"When a man arrives at a certain ripeness in intellect, any grand and spiritual passage serves as a starting-post towards the two and thirty palaees. How happy is such a voyage of eoneeption! What delicious, diligent indolenee! " "The passage has a pleasing savor to the tongue," Doetor Holmes commented, and gave me an appreciative caress.
One delectable suminer day of long ago is still bright for me. It is the day Miss Sullivan and I visited John Greenleaf Whittier at his quiet home on the Merrimac. He was delighted that I could pronounee his name so well. Among his treasures was a book of his poems in raised print. Eager to display
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my speech, I turned over the pages until I found "In School Days" and read it to himn. He said he had no difficulty in understanding me. I asked him many questions about the poem, and read his answers by placing my fingers on his lips. From the embossed book he read "The Hero," his poem to Doctor Howe. He expressed his admiration of Doctor Howe's work. He placed my hands on the statue of a slave, from whose crouching figure the chains were falling. "God is in all that liberates," said he. "She is thy spiritual liberator (referring to Miss Sullivan). What she and Doctor Howe have done strengthens my faith that some day all fetters shall be broken which keep the minds and hearts of men in bondage."
It was a happy chance that Mr. Albert H. Munsell wished to paint my portrait. I learned much from him. From our first meeting he had a remark- able understanding of my peculiarly circumscribed avenues of experience. He insisted, however, that in the poverty of sense-experience it is possible to grow concepts which approximate those of sight and hearing. "You cannot hear the birds singing," he would say, "but you can train your inner ear to hear the songs of poets. Your limitations need not debar you from your human heritage of a world many-tinted, vibrant and formed in beauty."
His conversations, spelled into my hand by Miss Sullivan while he painted, shed light in every corner of my mind, and gave a turn to my thoughts that has been fruitful of happiness.
In May, 1892, I gave a tea in aid of the Kindergarten for the Blind. Mrs. Mahlon D. Spaulding threw open her beautiful house for the occasion. Many people came, among them Doctor Hale, Bishop Brooks, Doctor Holmes, Mar- garet Deland, Mrs. Jack Gardner, Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, Louise Imogen Guiney, Mr. Barrett Wendell, Mr. William C. Endicott, Jr., Mr. J. P. Spaulding, Mr. Edward H. Clement, editor of the Boston Transcript, who had done much through his paper to make the tea a success, and Mr. Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, the "Listening Ear" of the Transcript. Not quite twelve years old, I felt round me and the blind children the great protecting arms of the City of Kind Hearts.
I have countless times pleaded the cause of the handicapped and the unfortunate in Boston since and the city has never failed to hold up my hands.
It has ever been in Boston's creed to render life safer and happier for the coming generation. In 1903 the Massachusetts association for promoting the interests of the adult blind was formed. I was asked by the new association to appear before the Massachusetts Legislature and urge them to appoint a state commission, whose duty it would be to investigate the condition of the blind, provide industrial training for them and place them in positions of use- fulness. The commission was appointed.
The association also started a vigorous campaign for the prevention of blind- ness and gave me an opportunity to write and speak for the movement to safe- guard the eyes of new-born babies. Since then the laws which were at that time passed have been enforced so effectively that now it is rare to see a baby in Massachusetts who has lost its sight through ophthalmia neonatorum.
Out of the campaign in Boston has sprung the National Committee for the Prevention of Blindness and the American Foundation for the Blind, which
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is equally interested in the sightless in all sections of the country and for which I am endeavoring at present to raise an endowment fund of two million dollars.
A pleasant memory to dwell upon is the happy days when I left my studies in Boston and ran away to the home of Mr. Chamberlin, "Red Farm," Wren- tham, Massachusetts. As the readers of the Transcript know, Mr. Chamberlin is wise in the ways of streams and woods and the wild life of the country. It was he who initiated me into the mysteries of trees and wild flowers, the stone walls and green pastures of New England.
The companionship of his children was precious to me and I was stimulated by the bright atmosphere which his guests created. People of many professions and talents foregathered at "Red Farm," among whom were Mary Wilkins, the quiet, shy woman whose books are so filled with the tragedy and pathos, the comedy and rural beauty of the villages of New England, and Mr. Brad- ford Torrey, whose talk about birds made their songs and habits an unfailing source of joy in my silent world. Richard Hovey made me long to roam up and down the world with the open-hearted children of the sea. There was Bliss Carman, the Canadian, big, shy, gentle, whose songs of the outdoors have ever lent music to my steps as I walk back and forth, round my garden or in woodland paths.
In Boston the idea of going to college took root in my mind and shaped the course of events which ultimately led me to enter Radcliffe College in the face of the strong opposition of many friends. Some of my Boston friends, however, regarded my ambition favorably and helped me to realize it. In 1900 the much debated entrance into Radcliffe took place and another chapter was written in the book of my life.
The four years at Radcliffe were a continuation of my Boston associations. Say what we will of the pleasures of acquiring knowledge, we love or hate a subject according to the personality behind it. There is no such thing as impersonality in the classroom.
William Allan Neilson's treatment of English literature had for me the freshness of a new critical gospel and the picturesqueness of a journey past old castles, bridges, historic cities, down rivers of romance from the age of Elizabeth to the century of Shelley, Wordsworth and Keats. His devotion to English tradition opened my eyes to the wealth of our heritage.
I can truthfully say that whenever I read a new book, I find myself remem- bering Doctor Neilson's manner of approaching an author. That is how I know that his teaching lives in the student's memory. His catholic, genial temper and fine scholarly equipment fit him for the important role he is now playing in the intellectual life of our country as President of Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
Josiah Royce throbbed and vibrated with knowledge. His imagination gave the Absolute a kind of reality. I think he made the dullest of his class sense the immensity of the universe and the infinity of thought. His philosophy influenced me strangely. I felt a kind of telepathic communication from his spirit - fragments of the universal intelligence projected towards me. Some- times as he talked, I felt that he stood with his eyes raised to the sun of truth in wonder, as a child might gaze amazed upon a miracle.
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William James was a very different man in temperament and point of view from Professor Royce, yet he had a profound admiration for him. I regard it as a misfortune that I did not come under the spell of Professor James's teaching. He did not lecture at Radcliffe while I was there, but I met him occasionally at the houses of mutual friends. Once he said I had the mystic's mind without the taint of commonsense. Another time he remarked, "You have escaped from your prison-house. Most of us are still beating about in . the dark round the walls of our prison and we seldom find the secret door of exit."
As the years pass, his writings mean more and more to me. I lift my fingers from the page only to wonder whether, if he could come back to earth, he would not write poems instead of philosophies.
In Charles Townsend Copeland's English class we were busily engaged in learning to write masterpieces, but some of us found little encouragement to pursue our ambition. Mr. Copeland would read our themes aloud, making us see that they were without substance, without ideas, without the true sense of the word. If we had something worth saying, he helped us to say it simply and directly. He lamented so many things that he found lacking in us, we secretly called him Jeremiah; but he was such a generous praiser of what was worth praising that he was adored by his students.
After my graduation from Radcliffe College I went to live in Wrentham with my teacher and her husband, John Macy. During the thirteen years we lived there I was in close touch with my Boston friends and the work for the blind. In 1917 my teacher and I moved to New York, where we are still living.
As I finish this sketch, memories crowd upon me of the friendliness of the Boston that made happy the little Southern girl just released from darkness and silence. I never hear the name of Boston without a warmth of feeling and a depth of love so real that there will come to ine through all my life, no matter where I go or what I do, some heartening thought of Boston. Often when I am absorbed in another place, I suddenly remember something that happened in Boston; I feel under my hands, not the tulips of my friend's garden, but the little plot of pansies and English daisies I planted with my blind play- mates in the Institution yard, with the sun warm upon our young heads. Boston's beautiful kindness to the sightless has ever shone before me, inspiring me to fresh effort, sustaining my faith and often turning defeat into victory.
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CHAPTER I LOOKING BACKWARD
THE MAKERS OF WINSOR'S "MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON" By M. A. DE WOLFE HOWE
Boston has always been acutely conscious of its own history. From the earliest days it has seemed worth while to somebody to record what was going on. To take single examples from each of the three centuries before our own - and such examples might be multiplied - the first Massachusetts governor, John Winthrop, wrote the seventeenth century "Journal" which became "The History of New England from 1630 to 1639"; the last of the royal governors, Thomas Hutchinson, produced his eighteenth century "History of the Province of Massachusetts Bay"; and in the nineteenth century the first Mayor Josiah Quincy, on retiring from the presidency of Harvard, busied himself at once with the writing of his "Municipal History of Boston." In each of these cases an important officer of government, not content with performing merely his public duties of administration, made it his private business to act also as the chronicler of affairs with which he had a special familiarity.
In 1880 the 250th anniversary of the settlement of Boston in 1630 came to be celebrated. By that time the historical interest, so to call it, had reached a point of considerable organization. Students of history, local and general, were no longer working each in his separate star. For nearly a hundred years the Massachusetts Historical Society had banded them together - first to the number of sixty and after 1857 of one hundred resident members besides corresponding members wholly and honorary members chiefly from outside the state. The Bostonian Society, with its emphasis on purely local history, was on the point of its establishment in 1881, and in the decade just ended, the teaching of Henry Adams at Harvard had imparted a powerful stimulus to the whole subject of history in the rising generation of scholars.
It was, however, indirectly rather than directly to such influences as these that the "Memorial History of Boston," published in four volumes in the 250th anniversary year of 1880, owed its origin .* This monumental work, like many another valuable contribution to history and literature, had its beginning in the mind of a publisher. Let the opening paragraph of the Preface to the first volume tell the story :
"The scheme of this History originated with Mr. Clarence F. Jewett, who, towards the end of December, 1879, entrusted the further develop- ment of the plan to the Editor. On the third of January following
* An effort to extend the work by the publication of a bfth volume in 1900 was made immediately before that date. Ticknor and Company were to have been the publishers, William H. Whitmore the editor-in-chief, and chapters by Edward Everett Hale, Sylvester Baxter, Horace G. Wadlin, William H. Lincoln, Winslow Warren, and Carl W. Ernst, of which the manuscripts have come to light in connection with the preparation of the present volume, were written. These manuscripts are now in the possession of the Boston Athenaeum.
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about thirty gentlemen met upon invitation to give countenance to the undertaking, and at this meeting a Committee was appointed to advise with the Editor during the progress of the work. This Committee consisted of the Rev. Edward E. Hale, D. D., Samuel A. Green, M. D., and Charles Deane, LL.D. The Editor desires to return thanks to them for their counsel in assigning the chapters to writers and for other assistance; and to Dr. Deane particularly for his suggestions during the printing. Since Messrs. James R. Osgood & Co. succeeded to the rights of Mr. Jewett as publisher, the latter gentleman has continued to exercise a supervision over the business management.".
This Preface is signed by Justin Winsor, editor of the volumes, and is notable for other points besides the ascription of credit for the inauguration of the enterprise to Clarence F. Jewett. Chief among these is the point of time, with all its implications of well planned and rapidly executed work. It is to be noticed that Jewett entrusted the execution to Winsor late in December, 1879, that a committee of three energetic members of the Massachusetts His- torical Society assumed in January, 1880, an advisory relation with the enter- prise, that the Preface to the work is dated September, 1880, that the first volume bears a copyright date of that year, and that the other three are all dated 1881. In view of the magnitude of the enterprise, and of the high quality of scholarship marking both the work of more than seventy contributors to the four volumes and the editorial task of assembling the great inass of material, correlating its widely various parts, providing explanatory and supplementary notes of great value, enriching the volumes with hundreds of illustrations, and attaining in twenty-three months the completed publication on which he had planned to spend two years,- in view of all this, Winsor's achievement is indeed extraordinary.
On the title page of each of the four volumes of the "Memorial History" appear the words (borne out by the passage already quoted from the Preface), "Issued under the business superintendence of the projector, Clarence F. Jewett." Of a somewhat elusive fame in the world of books, Jewett was the "projector" of other local histories of permanent value, and held that minor place among the publishers of his day which is apt to be occupied by the pro- ducers of subscription books. In selecting Justin Winsor for the editorship of the Boston volumes, in persuading him to undertake the formidable task, and then in giving him the co-operation an editor needs to receive from a publisher, he reared a monument on which the name of Clarence F. Jewett commands a special remembrance .*
But it is the name of Justin Winsor that associates itself primarily with the "Memorial History." The magnitude of his achievement has already been suggested. None but an extraordinarily competent and rapid worker
* Through investigations made by Mr. C. K. Bolton, Librarian of the Boston Athenaeum, it is learned that Clarence F. Jewett, born at Claremont, New Hampshire, about 1854, came to Boston in the 70's and was then associated with George H. Walker in the production of maps, a business still conducted by the Walker Lithograph and Publishing Company. The founder of this enterprise became associated also with the Walker- Gordon Laboratories. From the business of maps Jewett passed into that of more general publishing, and projected, besides the "Memorial History of Boston," the "Standard History of Essex County, Mass." (1878) ;
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could have attained it. Justin Winsor, born in Boston January 2, 1831, and, dying in Cambridge October 22, 1897, was just such a worker. Before entering Harvard College in the same class (1853) with President Eliot, he had written a "History of the Town of Duxbury," which appeared at the beginning of his freshman year. John Langdon Sibley, the Harvard Librarian, received the eighteen-year-old boy as a fellow-antiquarian, and gave him every opportunity to cultivate his taste for discursive reading and study. While still in college he tried his hand, with small success, at play-writing, and in three days pro- duced two farces. Also as an undergraduate he began to study the life and times of David Garrick, and for many years accumulated material out of which a monumental work would probably have been made but for the engrossing duties which engaged him from 1864 onwards.
In that year, after qualifying himself by European travel and much study at home for the life of an all-round man of letters - and making a place for himself as a writer on literary and artistic subjects - he became a trustee of the Boston Public Library. In this capacity he soon wrote a remarkable report which led to his appointment in 1868 as Librarian of that institution. Nine years later, in 1877, he became Librarian of Harvard University, and for the twenty remaining years of his life employed there his remarkable gifts as admin- istrator, scholar, and enlightened guide to the profitable use of books. Apart, like the "Memorial History," from his professional labors stood the eight- volume "Narrative and Critical History of America" (1889), in which his learning as a cartographer came into memorable service.
This bare outline of an uncommonly fruitful life could be illuminated by drawing still more fully on H. E. Scudder's "Memoir of Justin Winsor," in the "Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society," for instances of the human quality in the man which made him so much more than a scholar. "His play," wrote Scudder, "was intellectual." A characteristic example of it, recounted in the Memoir, was a skit he prepared for the Thursday Evening Club of Boston at the time when Bacon ciphers in Shakespeare were treated with a seriousness no longer accorded to them. By means of an analysis of a few lines in Milton's "Paradise Lost" he demonstrated that Edward Everett Hale's authorship of this poem was to be deduced from Milton's own words. If others have indulged in this sort of fooling, Winsor was among its pioneers.
He was fifty years old when the "Memorial History" was completed in 1881. The contributors to it included both veterans - the "elder statesmen" of historical writing in Boston - and writers who seem venerable to us today, but were then young. The figure of a circle might be applied to the group as a whole, but it was not so much a circle in the sense usually applied to groups of writers as it was a wheel, with Winsor at the hub, and with spokes reaching out to a rim represented by the co-ordinating, unifying work of the editor. It was
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