USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Popular history of Boston > Part 16
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" We rose, and slowly homeward turned, While down the west the sunset burned ; And, in its light, hill, wood, and tide, And human forms seemed glorified.
" The village homes transfigured stood, The purple bluffs, whose belting wood Across the waters leaned to hold The yellow leaves like lamps of gold.
"Then spake my friend : 'Thy words are true : Forever old, forever new, These home-seen splendors are the same Which over Eden's sunsets came.'"
His house, on his retirement, was in charge of his sister, Elizabeth H. Whittier, a woman richly endowed in mind, with a sweet face and disposition, a pure, loving heart, and an ever conscientious life. The love of the two for each other was like that of Wordsworth for his sister, or of Charles
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Associations of Whittier's Poetry.
and Mary Lamb. He speaks of this sweet fountain of affec- tion again and again in his poems, and pays a most touching tribute to her memory in "Snow-Bound." She herself was a poet, and he was accustomed to read to her the first copy of what he wrote. He has gathered into " Hazel Blossoms " several of her best poems with his own. "Since she died," he once remarked to a friend, " I cannot tell whether what I have written is good for anything or not."
The years immediately following the establishment of the Whittiers at their home in Amesbury are among the most fruitful in the poet's history. There was a quiet beauty about their home whose charm was its simplicity. The poet had a delightful garden ; little animals and pets were ever around him : a bantam now had the freedom of the kitchen, and now a gray parrot talked with him, very profoundly, from the back of his chair.
Eminent people shared the plain hospitality of the sunny rooms. Joseph Sturge found a welcome here. Sturge, like Whittier, was a descendant of a noted line of the gray fathers. Like Whittier, he was born in a rural town, reared in rustic simplicity, and entered con amore into the struggle against slavery. He came to this country full of antislavery zeal, and each heart - the poet's and the philanthropist's - knew its mate. After the death of Sturge's wife and child, his sister cared for his home. Both Whittier and his sister made his visit the occasion for verse-writing. When the sister of the reformer died, Whittier wrote to him : -
" Thine is a grief the depth of which another May never know ; Yet, o'er the waters, O my stricken brother ! To thee I go.
" I lean my heart unto thee, sadly folding Thy hand in mine ; With even the weakness of my soul upholding The strength of thine."
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The death of Sturge strongly affected the poet, and was made the occasion of the finest lines that, perhaps, he has ever written, beginning : -
" In the fair land o'erwatched by Ischia's mountains, Across the charmèd bay, Whose blue waves keep with Capri's silver fountains, Perpetual holiday,
A king lies dead," &c.
We have spoken of two of the towns in old Essex most intimately associated with his poetry, - East Haverhill, the scene of "Snow-Bound ;" and Amesbury, the scene of his home ballads, and the place in which most of the poems having political reference were written. His muse, with all of its limitations, has a somewhat wider local range. The Merrimack, on which he was born, and from which he has never long wandered, may be considered as his "river of song : " -
" We know the world is rich in streams Renowned in song and story, Whose music murmurs through our dreams Of human love and glory : We know that Arno's banks are fair, And Rhine has castled shadows, And, poet-tuned, the Doon and Ayr Go singing down their meadows.
" But while, unpictured and unsung By painter or by poet, Our river waits the tuneful tongue And cunning hand to show it, - We only know the fond skies lean Above it, warm with blessing, And the sweet soul of our Undine Awakes to our caressing."
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AN OLD-TIME HUSKING FROLIC.
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Associations of Whittier's Poetry.
The old towns of Newbury and Newburyport also share the immortality of his verse. The traveller who visits the tomb of Whitefield in the Federal Street Church, in New- buryport, will vividly call to mind the lines entitled "The Preacher."
"Under the church of Federal Street, Under the tread of its Sabbath feet, Walled about by its basement stones, Lie the marvellous preacher's bones.
"Long shall the traveller strain his eye From the railroad car as it plunges by, And the vanishing town behind him search For the slender spire of the Whitefield Church."
Gloucester, with its fantastic ghost lore, against whose gar- rison the spirits of the air, in old colonial days, were sup- posed to wage a warfare ; Marblehead, with old-time dialect, more strange when listened to than when seen in print, in the refrain of "Skipper Ireson's Ride ; " the curving beaches that sweep away from the mouth of the Merrimack, on which the poet once pitched his summer tent with Fields, the poet and the second Atlantic editor, who could decline a MS. so neatly that
"Bards, whose name is legion, if denied,
Bore off alike intact their verses and their pride ;"
and with Bayard Taylor, who,
" In idling mood, had from him hurled The poor squeezed orange of the world," -
all have a place in the poet's local panorama. The "Songs of Labor," especially "The Shoemakers," "The Drovers," " The Huskers," and " The Fishermen," are all home scenes, as faithfully pictured as they are familiar to the dwellers in " old Essex."
" How beautiful it was, that one bright day In the long week of rain ! Though all its splendor could not chase away The omnipresent pain.
" The lovely town was white with apple-blooms, And the great elms o'erhead Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms Shot through with golden thread.
" Across the meadows, by the gray old manse, The historic river flowed : I was as one who wanders in a trance, Unconscious of his road.
" The faces of familiar friends seemed strange : Their voices I could hear, And yet the words they uttered seemed to change Their meaning to my ear.
" For the one face I looked for was not there, The one low voice was mute ; Only an unseen presence filled the air, And baffled my pursuit.
" Now I look back, and meadow, manse, and stream Dienly my thought defines ; I only see - a dream within a dream - The hill-top hearse.l with pines.
"' ] only hear above his place of rest Their tender underton ?, The infinite longings of a troubled breast, The voice so like his own.
" There in seclusion and remote from men The wizard hand lies cold, Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told.
" Ah ! who shall lift that wand of magic power, And the lost clew regain ? The unfinished window in Aladdin's tower Unfinished must remain ! "
LONGFELLOW.
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE CONCORD AUTHORS AND THE ASSOCIATIONS OF THEIR WORKS.
LAKE WALDEN, cool and delicious, and full of summer splendor ! the memory of it haunts one in midwinter days like a dream. It is indeed little more than a pond ; but the circle of hills that surround it exhibit the perfec- tion of New England woods, and few lake- lets are always so deep, so clear, and so calm in summer-time.
Away from this shel- RALPH WALDO EMERSON. tered sheet of water on every hand stretch Walden woods, the dark green needles of the pine contrasting with the delicate tints of the oak leaves. The summer winds haunt the pine tops, as Thoreau's flute once haunted the tenantless hills. The shadowy under- growth is a tangled mass of flowers and ferns, full of sweet odors in the morning, and beautiful with a veiled, half- screened light during the day. The farms of Concord here and there penetrate these woods. It was here that Thoreau
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read and wrote, and here Emerson's "Wood-Notes " were inspired.
The literary period of Concord began about the year 1841, or soon after Emerson resigned the charge of the Second Church in Boston, withdrew from society, and went to the borders of Walden woods to live. Few young ministers ever ascended a more popular pulpit than that which.Emerson left after a pastorate of two years ; he succeeded Henry Ware, Jr., whose life was a powerful influence. Ware had been ten years in training this congregation up to his own ideal of religious culture and devotional living. He had positive views and a positive faith. Emerson was more uncertain and speculative.
He appeared as a literary recluse in the sleepy town of Concord, and finally established himself in the sleepiest part of the town, just on the borders of the green Walden woods. His house is partly hidden with dark pines. It is a lovely spot in summer, but it is somewhat dreary at other seasons. with the wind always moaning through the trees. Some of the trees that surround his mansion were planted by Haw- thorne and Thoreau.
" Emerson," says Alcott, his speculative neighbor, " likes plain people, plain ways, plain clothes ; shuns egotists ; loves solitude, and knows how to use it." He found the old Con- cord people sufficiently simple in their tastes and habits, and it is said that he always had a kind greeting for the farmers he used to meet in his philosophical walks in Walden woods.
Emerson wrote a poem soon after this self-exile from Bos- ton, which will serve as an excellent photograph of his occu- pation in retirement : -
" Good-by, proud world ! I'm going home ! Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine. Long through thy weary crowds I roam ;
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A river-ark on the ocean brine, Long I've been tossed like the driven foam ; But now, proud world ! I'm going home.
" Good-by to Flattery's fawning face ; To Grandeur with his wise grimace ; To upstart Wealth's averted eye ; To supple Office, low or high ; To crowded halls, to court and street ; To frozen hearts and hasting feet ; To those who go and those who come ; Good-by, proud world ! I'm going home.
" I'm going to my own hearth-stone, Bosomed in yon green hills alone, - A secret nook in a pleasant land, Whose groves the frolic fairies planned ; Where arches green, the livelong day, Echo the blackbird's roundelay, And vulgar feet have never trod, - A spot that is sacred to thought and God.
" O, when I am safe in my sylvan home, I tread on the pride of Greece and Rome ; And when I am stretched beneath the pines, When the evening star so holy shines, I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools, and the learned clan ; For what are they all, in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet ?"
Alcott followed Emerson's example soon, and left Boston society to live in the rural simplicity becoming a philosopher at Concord. He was a teacher in Boston. The description of the Plumfield school in Miss Louisa Alcott's " Little Men" is evidently drawn from the recollections of early days. Alcott was a radical antislavery man in the days of Boston's most stately conservatism, and when a poor colored girl ap- plied for admission to his school, he followed his conviction
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of duty, and admitted her. The act so worthy of his man- hood proved fatal to the school, and he was glad to seek the cool fringes of Walden woods, and found it a relief to be able to say, like Emerson, -
"Good-by, proud world ! I'm going home."
He took a roomy house near Emerson, built the fences around it himself, and began the life of a speculative philoso- pher, of the transcendental school of thought.
Hawthorne and Chan- ning widened the literary circle of Concord lit- erary men, the former occupying the "Old Manse" in which Emer- son wrote "Nature," which stood removed from the street, and near the old Concord battle-ground, its monuments, relics, and graves.
Hawthorne was retiring and reticent to an unusual degree even for a literary NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. man. He found the Old Manse full of antique re- minders of a departed generation ; portraits of New England ministers of Cotton Mather's days, narrow windows, and sus- picious shadows, and the traditional accompaniment of all these faded things, the moonlight-haunting ghost.
All of the old colonial mansions had their supposed ghosts ; but Hawthorne's ghost, like his house, was a trifle more sombre than the rest, wandering about, and chilling the spirits of the living by the rustle of its (black) silk gown.
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Here the Boston poets used to visit, - Longfellow, Fields, and the whole coterie of writers now passing one by one in solemn procession off the stage of literary life. Franklin Pierce was a guest. He was Hawthorne's college-mate, and through his life his most intimate friend.
When Franklin Pierce was elected President he offered Hawthorne the position of U. S. Consul at Liverpool.
THE OLD MANSE.
" Will the man who holds this office have to talk much ?" asked Hawthorne of the bearer of the intelligence.
" No," was the answer.
" Thank the Lord," was the fervent rejoinder. His char- acteristic always discovered itself in the happiest as well as the saddest moments of life.
Hawthorne did not die in Concord, but amid the New Hampshire hills. His old friend, Franklin Pierce, visited him in his last sickness, and was with him on the night of his death.
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He was buried in the most beautiful time of the year near the woods and streams he had loved so well. His remains were carried through the blooming orchards of Concord and laid down to an eternal rest beneath a group of pines on a hill- side overlooking the Concord battle-field. " All the way from the village church," says James T. Fields, "the birds kept up a perpetual melody. The sun shone brightly, and the air was as sweet and pleasant as though death had never entered the world." Longfellow was there, Lowell, Emerson, Alcott, Holmes, Channing, and Agassiz. Franklin Pierce was true to his early friend to the last, and mingled flowers with the earth in that hillside grave.
We recently visited the site of Thoreau's hut in Walden woods. A noble cluster of pines rises on a ridge of woodland near it, pines that the axe has spared, that loom up like a shad- owy cathedral, in which the winds of the seasons make perpetual music. The pond or lake is below it margined with bushes. A simple cross marks the spot where the poet-naturalist lived, and on it is written, "This is the site of Thoreau's Hut."
Thoreau built this hut with his own hands, and here lived more than two years. The birds became his com- THOREAU'S HUT. panions ; the wild partridge displayed her brood before his door, and the rabbits burrowed under his house, and were there secure from the hound and sportsman. Even the wood- mice came to know him, and one of them would take food from his hand. It was here that his most famous essays,
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many of which appeared in the Atlantic, were written, or had their origin.
Thoreau, in his essay on "Brute Neighbors," describes one of the battles between the black ants and the red ants that took place before his door. He treats the matter in true his- torical style as though it was an event as great as the Norman Conquest, and conveys the idea that he looked upon the issue with as much interest as he would contemplate one of the old battles of human ambition. The ant-hills in Walden woods still remain much the same as when that remarkable essay was written. It seemed to me like securing an uncommonly choice autograph when I found them.
In his essay on "Economy," he tells us how he lived in the woods during his protracted study of nature. His house cost him twenty-eight dollars. He was a vegetarian, and as he raised his own corn, beans, and potatoes, his expenses for food amounted to about one dollar a month. His books and his flute were his companions, though his literary friends sometimes visited him in his retreat. The Concord farmers used to hear the notes of his flute in the still summer evenings. A beautiful poem entitled "Thoreau's Flute " appeared in print soon after his decease.
Thoreau was a cynic - the same iconoclast in Harvard Col- lege as in Walden woods. He held that habits and customs of social life were all unnatural and wrong ; that true indepen- dence of character was a lost virtue ; and that following the customs of the rich made slaves of the poor. The remedy for the ills of society was a disregard to all conventional rules ; he himself acted on this theory ; but a world of Thoreaus would be a rather dreary place in which to live.
Thoreau died of consumption. His love of nature was strong to the last. He loved to look out of the window in his sickness. He awoke one morning, frost covered the win- dow pane and he had not the strength to scrape it off. "I
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cannot now even look out of doors," he said sadly, and the world from that time was as lost to him.
The surroundings of Concord have a peculiar charm in summer-time, a rare harmonious blending of grassy meadows, dreamy marshes, noble woods of variegated green, and limpid streams. Emerson, Channing, and Thoreau have all pictured the charms of the Concord River. It is a subtile, ill-defined charm, and one which requires days of delicious leisure among these calm landscapes to appreciate.
" Beneath low hills in the broad interval, Through which at will our Indian rivulet Winds, mindful still of sannup and of squaw, Whose pipe and arrow oft the plow unburies, Here, in pine houses built of new-fallen trees, Supplanters of the tribe, the farmers dwell."
Emerson.
" The river calmly flows Through shining banks, through lonely glen, Where the owl shrieks, though ne'er the cheer of men Has stirred its mute repose ; Still, if you should walk there, you would go there again." Channing
" I sailed up a river with a pleasant wind, New lands, new people, and new thoughts to find. Many fair reaches and headlands appeared, And many dangers were there to be feared ;
" But when I remember where I have been, And the fair landscapes that I have seen, THOU seemest the only permanent shore, The cape never rounded nor wandered o'er."
Thoreau.
The poetry of Thoreau is evasive and peculiar. " His poetry," says Emerson, " might be bad or good ; he no doubt
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wanted a lyric faculty and technical skill, but he had no source of poetry in his spiritual perception." There is a pleasure in getting at the quaint meanings of many of his rhymes : -
" If, with fancy unfurled, You leave your abode, You may go round the world By the old Marlborough road.
" The respectable folks - Where dwell they ? They whisper in the oaks, And they sigh in the hay."
Some of his lines are as mysterious as Emerson's " Brahma " was to the country editor, who failing to find any meaning in it after reading it in the usual way, began at the last line and read it backwards, and thought he received light.1
1 BRAHMA.
If the red slayer thinks he slays, Or if the slain think he be slain, They know not well the subtile ways I keep and pass and turn again.
Far or forgot to me is near, Shadow and sunlight are the same, The vanished gods to me appear, And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out, When me they fly I am the wings, I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahman sings.
The strong gods pine for my abode, And pine in vain the sacred seven ; But thou, meek lover of the good, Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.
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For example : -
" Give me an angel for a foe, Fix now the place and time, And straight to meet him I will go, Above the starry chime.
" And with our clashing bucklers' clang The heavenly spheres shall ring, While bright the northern lights shall hang Beside our tourneying."
The solitude of Thoreau's life gave him a strong sense of his own personality : ---
" My life is like a stroll upon the beach As near the ocean's edge as I can go ; My tardy steps its waves sometimes o'erreach ; Sometimes I stay, and let them overflow.
" My sole employment 't is, and scrupulous care, To place my gains beyond the reach of tides, - Each smoother pebble, and each shell more rare, Which ocean kindly to my hand confides."
One by one the old Concord poets and romancers have departed, as Thoreau saw Walden woods falling around him before he died. The axe was ever busy in his forests, and death has been as busy among his friends. "Thank God they cannot cut down the sky," he once said, as he heard of the wood-choppers' work. The skies remain, and trees sprout again, while even genius proves a wandering and uncertain light, and fades and disappears.
The Concord writers have been proverbially unsocial, but there appeared among them in the best days of their literary efforts a new Corinne, who more than any other American woman distinguished herself for her social charms. We refer to Margaret Fuller, Countess Ossoli, who had met
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nearly all the Concord philosophers and poets at Brook Farm, where she had enchanted other dreamers with the peculiar brilliancy of her own dreams. " When she came to Concord," says Emerson, "she was · already rich with friends, rich in experience, rich in culture. She was well read in French, Italian, and German literature." She entered the cold intellectual atmosphere of Concord like a nun, and she came and went like a social queen. She had a nature formed for MARGARET FULLER (COUNTESS OSSOLI ). friendship, and absorbed the feelings and affections of others, and influenced them by an intense personality that it was almost impossible to resist. Emerson says that she wore her circle of friends like a diamond necklace. "They were so much to each other that Margaret seemed to represent them all. She was everywhere a welcome guest. The houses of her friends in town and country were all open to her. Her arrival was a holiday."
" I knew her ten years," says Emerson (1836-1846), " and never without surprise at her new powers." She be- came an intimate friend of Mrs. Emerson : she flitted like a sunbeam among the shadows of the Old Manse after Haw- thorne came to occupy it, and was a frequent guest at Chan- ning's. "The Concord stage coachman," says Emerson, " distinguished her by his respect, and the chambermaid was pretty sure to confide in her on the second day her homely romance."
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" THE air is full of farewells to the dying, And mournings for the dead ; · The heart of Rachel, for her children crying, Will not be comforted !
" Let us be patient ! These severe afflictions Not from the ground arise, But oftentimes celestial benedictions Assume this dark disguise.
" We see but dimly through the mists and vapors ; Amid these earthly damps What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers May be heaven's distant lamps.
" There is no Death! What seems so is transition ; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life elysian, Whose portal we call Death."
LONGFELLOW
CHAPTER XXIV.
MOUNT AUBURN.
ON the 24th of September, 1831, a large concourse of people assembled in a deep, picturesque valley, near the Charles River, in Old Cambridge, to consecrate a rural cem- etery. The leaves were just beginning to change ; the sky was unclouded, and the cool air, purified by the showers on the preceding night, seemed a broad mirror of sunlight, here and there rimmed with vermilion hills and golden woods. Out of the valley or deep glen like a finger of faith rose Mount Auburn, jewelled with autumn fringes.
The literary men of a generation gone were there. Henry Ware, Jr., John Pierpont, and Charles Sprague, at that time the poetic lights of Boston, all contributed to the exercises. Mr. Pierpont's grand original hymn was taken up by a thousand voices and was echoed among the hills on the mellow, breezeless air : -
"Decay ! decay ! 't is stamped on all ; All bloom in flower and flesh shall fade ; Ye whispering trees, when ye shall fall, Be our long sleep beneath your shade !
" Here to thy bosom, Mother Earth, Take back in peace what thou hast given, And all that is of heavenly birth, O God, in peace recall to heaven."
A half century has passed away since that bright, calm September day, when first were thrown open these tranquil
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streets and shaded avenues of Boston's city of the dead. One by one the scholars, jurists, artists, and philanthropists, who gathered there, have returned again to share the un- broken companionship of the tomb. As the visitor threads the winding ways of the hill and dale he is everywhere re- minded of the literary and philanthropic lights of the past, and is made to feel how early falls the twilight and the evening of fame. Here rest Bowditch, Binney, Appleton, Thayer, Ashmun, Whiting, Buckingham, Story, and Lawrence,
OSSOLI MEMORIAL.
and a long generation of scholars and benefactors, whose names we have not even the space to recall. Here sleeps Hannah Adams, a once famous historical writer, and Frances Osgood, an admired poetess in her day, whose monument is a broken harp. Here is seen the elaborate monument of Margaret Fuller (Countess Ossoli), - " By birth, a child of New England ; by adoption, a citizen of Rome ; by genius, belonging to the world."
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