USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Romantic days in old Boston : the story of the city and of its people during the nineteenth century > Part 21
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Finally, it was amicably decided that to the wife of the mayor belonged the honors of this occasion inasmuch as the prince was the city's guest particularly. Mrs. Banks was accorded the prince's hand in the second quadrille. The prince did his duty nobly, dancing no less than seventeen times, and all who met him were charmed with his grace and his simple unaffected manners. Of the maidens
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who danced with him there long survived in Boston : Mrs. John Quincy Adams, née Miss Fanny Crowinshield; Mrs. Greely S. Curtis, (Harriot Appleton) ; Mrs. F. Gordon Dexter, née Susan Amory ; and Mrs. George E. Amory: who was Miss Carrie Bigelow. Among the throng of girls 1 who would fain have danced with him but did not was Fanny Carter Ronalds, - then a bride of a year, - the famous Boston beauty of the period, who, later, made her home for many years in London, where she was an intimate friend of King Edward and of Queen Alexandra. The news of her death followed closely (in 1910) that of the King who was a boy in 1860. The partner who was born an Apple- ton still lives to recall the ball.
The descriptions of the gowns worn at the Renfrew ball make very entertaining reading and I would like to quote several of them, did space allow. But this, of a literary lady who appears to have "helped the reporter out " is too delicious not to be given:
" Miss Martha Haines Buitt, A. M., the talented and accomplished literary belle of Norfolk, Va., the author of 'Leisure Moments,' and the contributor of several highly popular pieces to the serial publications of the day,
1 The " female preponderance " must have been appalling on this occasion. Besides the 1100 tickets admitting lady and gentle- man, which were sold, there were 525 for ladies only.
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made an elegant appearance. She was attired in a rich white silk dress, with lace overdress, the body with deep points, the dress looped with mauve imperatrice ribbons, and studied [sic. and how appropriate!] at intervals with en- ameled flowers of same color, bordered with gold, bertha of lace, ribbon and flowers to cor- respond with skirt. Hair braided in massive grecian braids and decorated with white flowers and pearls. This dress was an exact fac simile of one worn by the Empress Eugenie on a recent occasion. Miss Buitt had a very elegant bouquet of New York manufacture, from the floral depot of Chevalier & Brower, 523 Broad- way, under the St. Nicholas hotel. It repre- sented an imperial star, and was composed of blush rosebuds, tuberoses, heartsease, acanthus and sweet alyssum; it was supported by an elegant silver holder ornamented with a deep white silk fringe. Miss Buitt attracted much attention for her admirable figure, her exquisite costume, and for her graceful movements in the dance."
Dancing lasted until half past four in the morning, supper having been served at midnight in the Melodeon, next door, to which a passage had been cut through for the occasion; but not until three o'clock was there room to waltz comfortably in the huge auditorium. Yet the visitors as well as those who entertained them
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seemed to find the affair enjoyable and the secretary of the Duke of Newcastle wrote in his published diary of the Boston trip that every- thing about it " was in better taste than the entertainment of the New Yorkers."
Other foreigners of high degree whom the City of Boston entertained during this period were Louis Napoleon, in 1858; the Chinese embassy in 1868; the Japanese ambassadors in 1872 and Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil, in 1876. The emperor had expressed himself as desirous of receiving private social attentions only from Mrs. Louis Agassiz and Professor Longfellow, but he was anxious to meet Whittier, with whom he had corresponded both in regard to poetry and the emancipation of slaves, and Mrs. Agassiz arranged that they should come together at Mrs. Sargent's. When they met the emperor would have embraced the poet, Latin fashion, but the diffident Friend shyly avoided the encounter and led the way to a sofa where, for a half hour, the two talked happily.
There is an amusing story connected with Dom Pedro's visit. He went to climb Bunker Hill at six A. M., and, of course, found the keeper abed. That functionary, when roused, was by no means predisposed in favor of his early visitor, particularly when he found the stranger had to borrow fifty cents of his hackman in order to get into the monument. Richard
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Frothingham, who lived in Charlestown, hap- pened in at the lodge, two hours later, and, seeing Dom Pedro's signature in the visitors' book, asked the keeper how the emperor looked. Putting on his glasses to examine the hand- writing, the faithful guardian of the granite- pile muttered crossly, " Emperor, pooh! that's a dodge; that fellow was only a scapegrace without a cent in his pocket."
Two years after Dom Pedro's visit to America there came to this country, and in due season, to Boston, one foreign visitor who has always greatly interested me. She was Mrs. Anne Gilchrist, friend of the Rossettis, beloved of Walt Whitman and especially interesting to women of our time because she was the first woman publicly to express admiration for that puzzling volume, Leaves of Grass.
It was from New England, as we might expect, that the strongest opposition in this country to Whitman's poems came originally. On Boston Common, indeed, were fought out the first skirmishes of the battle afterwards waged so long and so mercilessly against Whit- man's book, particularly the "Children of Adam " portion of it. Emerson and Whitman were warm friends at the time of the book's appearance and the Concord philosopher rea- soned and remonstrated for hours with the revolutionary Whitman concerning the desira-
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bility of omitting some of the poems. Up and down the mall of Boston Common walked the two, vigorously discussing the thing. In his Diary Whitman records that every reason Emerson advanced for the omission of the poems in question was sound, every argument un- answerable.
"Yet," he comments, " I felt down in my soul the clear and unmistakable conviction to disobey all and pursue my own way." Which decision he forthwith expressed to Emerson. That famous talk on the Common which resulted in Whitman's adherence to Emerson's own precept, "Insist on yourself," - as set forth in the essay on Self Reliance, - occurred May 12, 1863. Six years later a copy of the resulting volume was sent to William Rossetti, Dante Gabriel's brother, and by him lent to Mrs. Gilchrist. Rossetti knew that this woman, who was his close friend, had both the heart and the brain to appreciate Whitman's integrity of purpose, whether she should or should not admire all that he had written, but he was somewhat surprised that she at once accepted Whitman almost in his entirety, and that with a fervor such as the poet had never before called forth from a woman.
" What I, in my heart, believe of Whitman," she then wrote, " is that he takes up the thread where Christ left it; that he inaugurates in
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his own person a new phase of religion, a re- ligion which casts out utterly the abjectness of fear, sees the nimbus around every head, knowing that evil, like its prototype, darkness, is not a thing at all, but the absence of a thing - of light. ... " And of the " Children of Adam " Mrs. Gilchrist made a descriptive phrase that will last for all time when she said: "This is not the heights brought down to the depths, but the depths lifted up level with the sunlit heights that they may become clear and sunlit, too."
To this woman who hastened to send him ardent expression of her faith Whitman's heart almost necessarily went out in warm affection. The letters which passed between the two during the eight years that intervened before Mrs. Gilchrist came to this country constitute one of the most remarkable correspondences of our time. They have recently been given to the world by the lady's family.
Mrs. Gilchrist's headquarters, while in Bos- ton, were at 39 Somerset Street, and she has written that she made more acquaintances during her two months' stay here than during her whole life before. But I have sought in vain for a Boston woman who remembers meeting her. On her way to Boston from Philadelphia, however, Mrs. Gilchrist spent some time in beautiful Northampton, a town which, socially, reminded her of Cranford, but
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" Cranford with a difference." For though the place had its maiden ladies and widows, its tea parties with " a solitary beau in the centre like the one white flower in the middle of a nosegay," she found the Northampton ladies much more vital than those of Cranford and her heart went out to them. I once had the pleasure of meeting two of the ladies who entertained her in Northampton and they recalled for my benefit the pleasure they had had in receiving this guest from England. She was dressed, they said, in simple black silk, that afternoon she came from her rooms at the Round Hill House to drink their tea and present a letter given her by Mon- cure Conway, whom a cousin of their own had married. It happened that they had ice-cream for supper and her naïve pleasure in this dish, which was then quite a delicacy, especially im- pressed itself on the mind of her hostess. After supper Mrs. Gilchrist sang some quaint old songs very sweetly, and once, when Tennyson was mentioned as "a great poet," she said quickly, " Ah, but you have a much greater one here in Walt Whitman."
In his poem, " Going Somewhere," written after Mrs. Gilchrist's death in 1885, Whitman calls this ardent disciple of his his "science friend," and his "noblest woman-friend." But the verse itself gives no hint of the great affec- tion which inspired this " memory leaf for her
-1
MRS. ANNE GILCHRIST. From the painting by her son, Herbert Harlakenden Gilchrist.
Copyright, 1888, by Theodore Bacon. DELIA BACON.
From a daguerreotype taken in 1853.
P.LOW BOOK BINDER
P. Low Boka NO
HAIR
SMAGE BUTTS
WM.D. TICKNOR & Co
WMD. TICANDRIO BOOKS STATIONERY
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THE FIRST OLD CORNER BOOKSTORE, WASH- INGTON AND SCHOOL STREETS. Page 400.
JAMES T. FIELDS. Page 400.
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dear sake." It is, indeed, Whitman at his
very dryest. Which proves that he could be impersonal in treating a subject upon which he felt deeply. His moment of deepest self- revelation seems to have come later when, speaking to Horace Traubel of Rossetti's warm brotherly love for Mrs. Gilchrist, he said, " She was his friend; she was more than my friend. I feel like Hamlet when he said forty thousand brothers could not feel what he felt for Ophelia."1
Another literary woman who came to Boston during the period we are here considering, - though, in point of years, her visit ante-dated Mrs. Gilchrist's by a whole quarter of a century, - was Miss Delia Bacon, originator of the so-called Baconian theory. In Mrs. John Farrar's Recollections of Seventy Years may be found a highly interesting account of this writer's unusual personality and of her sad decline. "She was the first lady whom I ever heard deliver a public lecture and the hall in which she spoke was so crowded that I could not get a seat; but she spoke so well that I felt no fatigue from standing."
This Boston course was so successful that Mrs. Farrar persuaded Miss Bacon to give a series of talks on history in Cambridge and arranged for her a very appreciative class which used to meet in the large parlor of the Brattle 1 With Walt Whitman in Camden.
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House. It was after this course had been successfully completed that Miss Bacon first began to talk to her friends about going to England. They encouraged her in the idea, thinking that she could there make a success of her lectures just as she had done here. " But," says Mrs. Farrar, "after talking this up for a time I perceived that I was talking in vain. She had no notion of going to England to teach history; all she wanted to go for was to obtain proof of the truth of her theory, that Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him, but that Lord Bacon did. This was sufficient to prevent my ever again encouraging her or talking with her about Shakespeare. The lady whom she was visiting put her copy of his works out of sight, and never allowed herself to converse with her on this, her favorite subject. We considered it dangerous for Miss Bacon to dwell on this fancy, and thought that, if indulged, it might become a monomania, which it subsequently did."
A "Life " of this gentle monomaniac was written in 1888 by Theodore Bacon, her nephew (who has since died), and I think I have never read a sadder book. The little Delia was born, we there learn, February 2, 1811, in a small Ohio town whither her father had gone from Connecticut, to pursue his labors as a mis- sionary. Things did not prosper. however,
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with the pioneer preacher, so, with his delicate wife and his six little children, he soon journeyed back to Connecticut where, in 1817, he died leaving a very helpless family. Schoolteaching, story-writing and even an attempt at dramatic composition occupied Miss Bacon in the years preceding her success as a lecturer. Her biog- rapher hints at an unhappy love-affair which, coming to her at the mature age of thirty-five, may have had something to do with the un- settling of her mind. By 1853, she could think of nothing but of her Baconian prepossession and she found the burden of her historical lessons an intolerable one.
Emerson was very kind to Miss Bacon from the beginning of his acquaintance with her, about this time, but he never in the least believed in her theory of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, always referring to it as a " brilliant paradox." From him she was obliged to bear this but she would not bear it from her brother, Dr. Leonard Bacon, a suc- cessful and much respected clergyman, and there followed an estrangement between them. The one thing of which she could now think was of England, to which place she sailed May 14, 1853, armed with introductory letters from Emerson to many people of literary prominence. Most of these letters she never used; she was much too occupied with what Carlyle soon
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came to call her " tragically quixotic enter- prise " to cultivate society. But the Carlyles were most kind to her and, after her first bold and brilliant paper had been published, - through Emerson's good offices, - in the Jan- uary, 1856, number of Putnam's Monthly, Hawthorne, who was now United States consul in Liverpool, also aided her, materially as well as by his friendly sympathy.
Nothing in all Hawthorne's life is more honorable than the noble generosity' and the unfailing helpfulness which he bestowed on this forlorn countrywoman of his, whom he never met but once and who was certainly a very trying literary aspirant for one of his nature to deal with. When the lady spoke to him contemptuously of the " Old Player " he told her that she really grieved him. Whereupon she replied, "I am sorry to have hurt your feelings with my profane allusions to the Earl of Leicester's groom, a witty fellow enough in his way. But the person you love and reverence is not touched by my proceeding. He is the one I am at work for."
Before the two met, the final blow came to Miss Bacon. Several packets of manuscript, which she had entrusted to Mr. Emerson for use in Putnam's, were lost in transportation and in addition the magazine refused to go on with the serial publication of the work. Miss
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Bacon's friends began to urge her by every mail to come home. But this she absolutely refused to do. To Hawthorne she wrote, "I will not go. I will open a ' cent shop ' in my House of Seven Gables first. There is not anything which is honest that I will not do rather than put the Atlantic Ocean between me and what I came to find."
Hawthorne has told in his English note book of his single visit to Miss Bacon. "I was ushered up two (and I rather believe three) pair of stairs" he there records, "into a parlor somewhat humbly furnished, and told that Miss Bacon would soon come. There were a number of books on the table and, looking into them, I found that every one of them had some reference, more or less im- mediate, to her Shakespearian theory, - a volume of Raleigh's History of the World, a volume of Montaigne, a volume of Lord Bacon's letters, a volume of Shakespeare's Plays, and on another table lay a large roll of manuscript which I presume to have been a portion of her work. To be sure, there was a pocket Bible among the books, but everything else referred to the one despotic idea that had got possession of her mind. . Unquestion- ably she was a monomaniac; these overmas- tering ideas about the authorship of Shake- speare's plays, and the deep political philosophy
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concealed beneath the surface of them, had completely thrown her off her balance; but, at the same time, they had wonderfully devel- oped her intellect and made her what she could not otherwise have become.
"I had expected (the more shame for me, having no other ground of such expectation than that she was a literary woman) to see a very homely, uncouth, elderly personage and was quite agreeably disappointed by her aspect. She was rather uncommonly tall and had a striking and expressive face, dark hair, dark eyes, which shone with an inward light as soon as she began to speak, and by and by a color came into her cheeks and made her look almost young. . . I could suppose her to have been handsome and exceedingly attractive once. . She assured me that she was per- fectly happy and I could well conceive it; for Miss Bacon imagined herself to have received (what is certainly the greatest boon ever assigned to mortals) a high mission in the world with adequate powers for its accomplish- ment. . . . "
Yet the privations the poor lady suffered while preparing her manuscript for publication were terrible. She lived on the poorest food, was often without the means of having a fire in her chamber, and she told Mrs. Farrar that she wrote a great part of her large octavo
٠ ٢٠
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volume sitting up in bed in order to keep warm.
The introduction which Hawthorne wrote for the book when it came out is very straight- forward and very touching. In it he says that the author "has given nothing less than her life to the work." And this was literally true. For scarcely had the monumental Philosophy of Shakespeare's Plays Unfolded, been put be- tween covers when Miss Bacon's mind failed utterly. Through the good offices of Emerson and Hawthorne she was then brought back to her family by a young relative and, after pass- ing some months in a " Retreat " at Hartford, died in that city of her childhood September 2, 1859. Her best epitaph was pronounced by Hawthorne where he says, "I know not why we should hesitate to believe that the immortal poet may have met her on the thresh- old of the better world and led her in, reassuring her with friendly and comfortable words, and thanking her (yet with a smile of gentle humor in his eyes at the thought of certain mistaken speculations) for having interpreted him to mankind so well."
CHAPTER XIV
BOSTON AS A LITERARY CENTRE
T HERE is a stiff-necked reluctance on the part of certain American cities to ac- knowledge that Boston is or ever has been a literary centre. Even during that golden age when Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes and Whittier here sang together; Bancroft, Pres- cott, Motley and Parkman here wrote history, Garrison, Phillips, Parker and Sumner here preached reform-and Thomas Gold Appleton flitted about from circle to circle, cheering them all with his wit1-magazine articles used occa- sionally to appear questioning Boston's claim to literary distinction!
Emerson was, of course, Boston-born (his early home was on Summer Street near what is now the corner of Chauncy Street), and he occupied a pulpit here as a young man. All his life he came back and forth to the city from his chosen retreat in Concord and he never lost his love for it. Longfellow's relations with Boston were of a much more casual kind.
1 Emerson called him " the first conversationalist in America."
1
1
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The lode-star which drew him oftenest to the city was Father Taylor, whose preaching in North Square to a devoted company of sailors seems greatly to have attracted the Cambridge poet and scholar.
Lowell's closest association with Boston was about the year 1857, when he became first editor of the Atlantic Monthly, a position which he held for four years. Holmes, however, whom Lowell stipulated should be "the first con- tributor to be engaged " for the new magazine if he were to accept its editorship, may well be called the most typical Bostonian that our modern Athens has ever known. To be sure, he was born in Cambridge; but almost his entire life of eighty-five years was spent in Boston and he was very likely speaking of himself when he said that for a Bostonian the State-House is the hub of the solar system. By reason of this remark as well as because he is identified with no less than three Boston streets - besides the "Long Path " which stretches from Joy Street to Boylston Street on the Common - there is no danger that his name will soon cease to be linked with that of the old town whose very ground he loved. "I have bored this ancient city through and through in my daily travels," he makes the Autocrat say, " until I know it as an old inhabitant of a Cheshire knows his cheese." For eighteen
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years he lived in Montgomery Place, now Bosworth Street; then from 1859-1871 he made his home at 164 Charles Street, there writ- ing, among other things, the Professor at the Breakfast Table, Elsie Venner and his fa- mous poem, "Dorothy Q." And when Charles Street became too noisy, he moved to 296 Beacon Street, where his study in the rear of the house overlooked the Charles River to Cambridge and beyond.
It is hard to realize that Holmes was nearly fifty years old when, through Lowell's acumen, he first came into prominence as a literary man. He has naïvely described his own surprise at this metamorphosis: "I, who felt myself outside the charmed circle drawn around the scholars and poets of Cambridge and Concord, having given myself to other studies and duties, wondered somewhat when Mr. Lowell insisted upon my becoming a contributor. I looked at the old Portfolio and said to myself: ' Too late! too late! This tarnished gold will never brighten, these battered covers will stand no more wear and tear; close them and leave them to the spider and the bookworm.' "
But Lowell knew what he was about. He had been present at many a dinner which Holmes made brilliant by his wonderful talk and his occasional poems, and he applied a friendly pressure to which the little professor cheerily
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responded. Already the "first contributor " had christened the new magazine The Atlantic, and when his department, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, was announced, the success of the venture became assured. To be sure, there were many who did not know what the nom de plume meant, and it was a joke, which may also have been a truth, "that the pro- prietor of a well-known religious weekly as- sumed the new department to be one given over to cook-book matters! "
Whittier carried a Boston latchkey during the early part of his life. For eight months, in 1829, while he was editing The Manufacturer he lived with Rev. William Collier at 30 Federal Street where Garrison also lodged. During the strenuous anti-slavery days he used to stop, while in Boston, at the Marlborough Hotel, of which mention was made in the chapter on the old hostelries, and, later, he was often the guest of Governor Claflin at the spacious house numbered 63 Mt. Vernon Street, which all but adjoins that made famous as the Boston home of Thomas Bailey Aldrich.
It is hard to say whether Aldrich is more intimately associated with Ponkapog, which I assure you is real though many have supposed it to be as fictitious as Puritania, or with this house at 59 Mt. Vernon Street. Since my own memories of him are connected with the latter
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place we will talk of that, however. Mt. Vernon Street is one of the loveliest spots in the world. Its houses have an air of old-fashioned solidity and of comfort not to be found in any on Boston's "made land," while from the top of the hill, - and Aldrich's house is just at the apex, -one can see the beautiful Charles River, winding lazily into the distance. Some of the homes retain the little blue panes of glass, by passing through which the sun was supposed to acquire even more than its natural salubrity, and in front of the Aldrich house, though it is in the very heart of Boston, is a gay little patch of lawn upon which the sun through the adjacent trees makes quaint arabesques of shade.
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