USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > The story of Essex County, Volume II > Part 13
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Anne Bradstreet had probably always written poetry; and while she was still in Ipswich, she circulated manuscript volumes of it among her friends. Her brother-in-law, John Woodridge, took one of these copies to London, and without her knowledge had it printed there, in 1650, with an introduction by Nathaniel Ward, who was then in Eng- land. It was called "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America, Or several poems compiled with great variety of wit and learning, full of Delight."
In these poems Anne Bradstreet's instinctive simple emotions and talent for verse-making are obscured by her imitation of the worst features of contemporary poetry-the complicated imagery, the learned allusions brought in by force. She sang of physics, of vital forces and human characteristics, of natural philosophy. There is a long rhymed history, a dialogue between Old England and New --- dismal subjects for a lyric poet. Yet there are several poems included
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which come straight from her heart. There is the famous one to her husband :
"If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee. If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if ye can."
And of her children, all wilderness born, she wrote :
"I had eight birds hatcht in one nest; Four Cocks there were, and Hens the rest, I nursed them up with pain and care Nor cost nor labor did I spare, Till at the last they felt their wing Mounted the trees, and learn'd to sing."
In view of her husband's remarriage after her death, this poem written when she felt herself dying is peculiarly touching (though she lived for years after writing it) :
"And when thou feelst no grief as I no harms Yet love thy dead who long lay in thine arms And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains, Look to my little babes my dear remains, And if thou love thyself or loved'st me, These O protect from step-Dames injury.
Her "Contemplations," issued after her death in a new edition of her poems, is her best work; far less imitative, closer to Sidney and Spenser than to Du Bartas, who had been her earlier model, it is often lovely :
"Under the cooling shadow of a stately Elm, Close sat I by a goodly river's side, Where gliding streams the rocks did overwhelm;
A lonely place, with pleasures dignified. I once that loved the shady woods so well Now thought the rivers did the trees excell, And if the sun would ever shine. there would I dwell."
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She died of consumption in Andover in 1672. Her funeral elegy, written by the Rev. John Norton, shows how much even her admirers could have profited by studying her verse a little more closely.
"Behold how tears flow from the learned hill Or raping numbers like the Thracian song Her breast was a brave Pallace, a Broadstreet Were all heroick ample thoughts did dwell.
And two centuries later, said Samuel Eliot Morison : "The genius of Anne Bradstreet was reincarnated in Emily Dickinson."
Shortly after Anne Bradstreet's first poems were published, John Wise, who has been called the first great American democrat, was born. Baptized in Roxbury, August 15, 1652, he was graduated from Harvard in 1673, and ten years later became minister in Ipswich, where his house, in Chebacco parish, is still standing.
He was imprisoned by Andros for remonstrating against taxa- tion without authority of the representative assembly. The following year he brought action against the Chief Justice, who had denied him the benefit of habeas corpus. He went to Canada in 1690 as chaplain to the expeditionary forces against Quebec, an account of which he afterwards published. His most important writings were: "The Church Quarrel Espoused," in 1710, and "A Vindication of the Gov- ernment of New England Churches," 1717, later published together. He died in Ipswich on April 8, 1725; but interest in his writing sur- vived him. Nearly fifty years after a large edition of his work was published; and when the Declaration of Independence was drawn up, it took over bodily several of his dicta. Moses Tyler said :
"No other American author of the Colonial period is the equal of John Wise in the union of great breadth and power of thought with great splendor of style."
to his eloquence, too, was added satire :
"When Temptation makes its signal, let them rather tres- pass upon Gravity by following the Hounds in the Forrest, let them write on the ground, or spend the time . .. . in Catching Flies, rather than to contrive how to subvert or alter the government in the Church."
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For fifty years after the death of John Wise, Essex County pro- duced no particularly distinguished literary figure. Then, on March 26, 1773, Nathaniel Bowditch, the great navigator, was born in Salem, the descendant of three American generations of shipmasters. His father was so poor that Nathaniel had to leave school at ten to help him. He was apprenticed two years later to a ship chandler and continued with him until his first voyage. But he never for a moment stopped studying; he learned algebra, and when he was fifteen con- structed an almanac for 1790. Moreover, he found ways to learn French and geometry. At this early age, too, he made a sundial and helped to survey Salem.
Between 1795 and 1803 he made five voyages, first as clerk, then as supercargo, and then as master. He kept careful journals, and when the usual bearings were faulty he corrected them. He contrived also to learn Spanish, Italian, and Portugese.
At this time the most popular work on navigation was by an Eng- lishman. It was J. H. Moore's "Practical Navigator." Bowditch prepared the first American edition, revising and correcting the origi- nal. His name was not mentioned until the third edition. During Bowditch's lifetime, no less than twelve editions came out. In 1844 "Bowditch's Useful Tables" were reprinted from the whole work, and themselves went into seventeen editions. For many years "The Practical Navigator" was the standard work in the English language. He was made a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at twenty-six, and Harvard gave him the degree of Master of Arts in 1802 and Doctor of Laws in 1816. In 1804 he was made president of the Essex Fire and Marine Insurance Company, which he directed very skillfully until he resigned in 1823 to be an actuary of the Mas- sachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Society, which he remained till his death.
During the time he was living in Salem he made charts of the harbors of Salem, Beverly and Manchester, and proposed and solved several problems in "Adrain's Analyst." Refusing all offers of chairs at various universities, he worked on the "Memoirs" of the Ameri- can Academy, and translated and commented on the first four volumes of Laplace's "Mécanique céleste," which was published at his own charge from 1829 to 1839. On the resignation of John Quincy Adams, in 1829, he was made president of the academy.
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Also, while he was in Salem, he wrote many papers on astronomi- cal and nautical questions. He was made a member of all the scien- tific societies of the world, and his fame spread to all civilized countries.
He married in March, 1798, Elizabeth Boardman, who died shortly after, and in October, 1800, his cousin, Mary Ingersoll, by whom he had six sons. He died in Boston, March 16, 1838. Alert and untiring of mind, exact in his observations, honest and independ- ent, he well deserved his great reputation.
A few years younger than Nathaniel Bowditch, Henry Pickering, the poet, was also descended from an old Salem family, though he was born in Washington's Headquarters in Newburgh, New York. Almost nothing is known of his life except that he was born on Octo- ber 8, 1781, became a merchant first in Salem and then in New York, and died in New York, May 8, 1838, at fifty-six. His books are very rare, for they were privately printed, perhaps because of the author's lack of fame, perhaps of his retiring nature. His "Ruins of Paestum" was published in 1822 and his "Poems" in 1831.
He was much influenced by the poetry of the earlier romantic poets. Echoes of Gray are to be heard in
"The bat has ta'en his headlong flight"
and Collins must have been read by the man who wrote (addressing the song sparrow by its Latin name ) :
"Oft as the year In gloom is wrapped, thy exile I shall mourn. Oft as the spring returns, shall hail sincere Thy glad return."
And, like them, he mourned over the ruins of dead civilizations. Yet his temper was very sober; he took more pains with his prosody than most of his contemporaries; and used more elaborate meters; and he had a certain grace. Above all, he escaped their prosiness and their faintly stuffy provinciality.
Of this prosiness and provinciality, there could be no better exam- ple than the poems of Hannah Flagg Gould. Born in Lancaster, in 1789, she moved, in 1808, to Newburyport, where she lived a long and uneventful life, occupied with being her father's housekeeper and devoted companion and with doing good and pious works of charity.
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She had a knack of versifying, and amused herself by writing mock epitaphs on local characters. In 1832 she had a volume of poetry pub- lished, which met with instant success to her own surprise. For the rest of her life she was a constant contributor to periodicals, and wrote several other books. Among them are: "Gathered Leaves," a book of prose articles, in 1846; "The Diosma," a perennial, 1850; "The Youth's Coronal," 1851; "The Mother's Dream," 1853; "Hymns and Poems for Children," 1854; and "Poems for Little Ones," in 1863. She died in Newburyport, September 5, 1865, at the age of seventy-six.
As a writer she was simple and sincere, and not without vivacity, but her subjects were so trivial and her sentiments so uniformly improving that they could not survive her age. She wrote the soliloquy of a crocus, an address to a breastpin ; and her most famous poem was "The Snow Flake":
"'Now if I fall, will it be my lot To be cast in some lone and lowly spot, To melt and to sink unseen, or forgot? And then will my course be ended ?' 'Twas this a feathery Snowflake said, As down through measureless space it strayed, Or as half by dalliance, half afraid, It seemed in mid-air suspended."
In 1789, the same year as Hannah Flagg Gould, Joseph Barlow Felt was born in Salem, of which he was to become the annalist. He went to school in Atkinson, New Hampshire, and in 1813 was gradu- ated from Harvard. He taught school for a while, and then studied for the ministry. But he had had only two parishes, in Sharon, from 1821 to 1824, and then in Hamilton, from 1824 to 1833, before his health failed, and he retired and moved to Boston.
While he was still in Hamilton he had become interested in local history. He published the "Annals of Salem" in 1827, and wrote articles for "John Farmer's Genealogical Register" in 1829. His "History of Ipswich, Essex and Hamilton" came out in 1834. He classified and rearranged the State archives in Boston from 1836 to 1839; he was, from 1842 to 1850, librarian of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and from 1850 to 1853, president of the New
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England Historic Genealogical Society. His "History of Massa- chusetts Currency" appeared in 1839. His other books are the "Collections of the American Statistical Association," 1847; "A Memoir or Defense of Hugh Peter," 1851; "Customs of New Eng- land," 1853; and "The Ecclesiastical History of New England," Vol. I, 1851; Vol. II, 1862.
He married on September 18, 1816, Abigail Adams Shaw, and after her death, on November 16, 1862, Catharine Bartlett Meacham. He died in Salem, September 8, 1869, at the age of eighty.
Though he loved his historical writing, and was unusually diligent in searching for new material, his style was so unwieldy, so given to homilies, and his views so colored by prejudice that his work is of use rather as a source book than for its own merits.
As Felt is chiefly known as the historian of Salem, his contempo- rary, Alonzo Lewis, is known as the historian of Lynn, where he spent his whole life. Born August 28, 1794, he taught at the Lynn Acad- emy, and became its principal; he edited one of its newspapers, was a civil engineer, and for many years justice of the peace. His "History of Lynn" was published first in 1829, and in 1844 went into a second edition, and in 1831 his "Forest Flowers and Sea Shells" appeared.
A later edition of the history, edited by a distinctly unfriendly friend or jealous rival, says of him :
"He was three times married, or rather twice, for his second companion was an ostensible rather than a real wife, and from her he was soon parted."
(In fact, though only seventeen, she already had a husband living. )
"Mr. Lewis' celebrity as a writer remained rather local than general, notwithstanding his superior endowments. Nude description, while it may interest friends and neighbors, can never attain the highest and most enduring fame. His thirst for praise almost assumed the form of an absolute disease."
He died in Lynn, January 21, 1861, at the age of sixty-six, and his biographer gloats over "the singularly small attendance at his obsequies."
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His prose is lifeless and undistinguished; his poetry, far more ambitious, is even worse :
"Like the moon which looks out from a cloudy sky 1
Is the soul which beams from her large blue eye,
Where utterless thoughts appear and flee Like shadows of clouds o'er a sunny sea."
As dull and as worthy as Lewis was William Bingham Tappan, the poet. He was born in Beverly, October 29, 1794. With only six months of schooling, he became a teacher. For six years he taught in Philadelphia ; then he went to Boston and worked in Sunday schools. He became general agent of the Sunday School Union, and carried on his activities in Cincinnati and Philadelphia as well as Boston. In 1846 he was licensed to preach.
His books include "New England and Other Poems," 1819; "The Poet's Tribute," 1840; "Poems and Lyrics," 1842; "Poetry of the Heart," 1845; "Sacred and Miscellaneous Poems," 1846; "The Poetry of Life," 1848; "Late and Early Poems," and also the "Memoirs of Captain James Wilson," 1849.
Tappan's poems are characterized by solemnity which often approached portentousness. His themes are general; he was pri- marily interested in religion and next in politics. His poetry seems only dull to today's reader; as can be seen from this poem, expres- sive of the hope that he will not die away from home :
"But on some throbbing breast reclined, That beat alone to love and me, Each parting pang subdued, how kind, How peaceful, would my exit be."
That exit took place in West Needham, on June 18, 1849, when he was fifty-six.
More cosmopolitan, and infinitely more famous than any of these Essex County contemporaries was William Hickling Prescott, his- torian of Spain. He was born in Salem, May 4, 1796. His father was wealthy; and he had a pleasant and carefree boyhood. He enjoyed Harvard, until by a foolish carelessness of one of his fellow- students, one of his eyes was put out in his junior year. Two years later the other eye became inflamed and grew steadily worse. For
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the rest of his life he had to be extremely cautious about reading and often was practically blind.
He gave up his intention of practicing law, and went to Europe, spending much of his time in his grandfather's estate in the Azores, trying to decide what to do with his life.
Returned to Boston, he set himself to a thorough course of prepa- ration for writing history, and managed-though nearly everything had to be read aloud to him-to become grounded in the history and literature of Western Europe. On March 4, 1820, he married Susan Amory.
He began the following year his career of writing reviews and articles in the "North American Review." During the next fifteen years he wrote a long series of essays, which, in 1845, were collected under the title of "Biographical and Critical Miscellanies." But by far the greater part of his time was given over to studying Spanish history, and in 1838 he published the "History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic." Though he had hesitated long before publishing it, because he doubted its worth, the whole edi- tion was exhausted in five weeks, and New York and London soon acclaimed a great new historical writer.
His "History of the Conquest of Mexico," published in 1843, and the "History of the Conquest of Peru," in 1847, which have not yet been superseded, brought him all sorts of honors. His friend, George Ticknor, declared that his trip to England in 1850 was "the most brilliant visit ever made to England by an American citizen, not clothed with the prestige of official station." In 1857 he brought out a new edition of William Robertson's "History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V," with a supplement written by himself and deal- ing with the life of the Emperor after his abdication. His last book was the "History of the Reign of Phillip II." He died in Boston, January 28, 1859, at sixty-two.
George Ticknor's "Life of Prescott" gives a delightful impres- sion of the man himself, his charm, his gayety, his contagious smile in spite of constant worry and pain. At a time when it was the custom to give a moral slant to every fact set down, it was Prescott's origi- nality to let the facts speak for themselves. He brings to life the pageantry of Spain, its gloom and magnificence, and the glamour of the mysterious Aztecs. Edwin Percy Whipple said of him :
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"With all his taste for large views, which comprehend years in sentences, the most mole-eyed analyst has not a keener sight for the small curiosities of history.
He made his readers understand the Spanish character, foreign as it was to him and to themselves. Whipple continues :
"His worst characters are so fully developed that we per- ceive their humanity as well as their rascality. They never appear as bundles of evil qualities, but as men.
Prescott's writing seems so modern that it is with surprise that one realizes that Robert Stevenson Coffin, who belongs so com- pletely to a vanished age, was actually born later than he, in 1797, in Brunswick, Maine.
"Where the tall pines majestic grow First lisped the child of song"
is his characteristic comment on the event. His parents separated when he was very young; he was condemned to a life of "servile drudgery." First apprenticed to a printer in Newburyport; he next became a sailor, and during the War of 1812 was imprisoned on a British ship. He worked on newspapers in Boston and Philadelphia and New York, where he published occasional verses. He returned to Rowley to write his "Life of the Boston Bard" (his own name for himself), which is perhaps the lowest point in the romantic movement :
"In a thoughtless humor, being in much haste, I put on, while in a state of perspiration, a damp if not a wet, shirt! Within fifteen minutes after the commission of this most imprudent act, I felt that my whole system had undergone a rapid and fatal shock !
This, and all the other horrors of his life, the reader is condemned to relive with him. But perhaps his description of his sorrows is not more painful than his verse, which, under the name of "The Oriental Harp, Poems of the Boston Bard," was published in 1826:
"Oh, sacred hour of sweet repose, To misery's child, ah ! doubly dear, Oh, stay till heaven has soothed my woes, Dispelled my doubts, and calmed my fears."
Essex-45
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Or, worst of all, on a lady blushing :
"Why should the rose so quickly rush To fill the lilly's place ?"
He did not long survive the recital of his anguishes, and died in Rowley, May 7, 1827, when he was only thirty, carrying his fidelity to the romantic tradition to the point of dying young.
After the "Boston Bard," the writings of George Lunt seem severely practical. He was born in Newburyport, December 31, 1 803, and was educated at Phillips Academy in Exeter and Harvard, from which he was graduated in 1824. Industrious from the first, he kept school at Groton while he was still a student at Harvard, and then was for some years principal of the High school in Newburyport. He studied law in Newburyport, represented that town in the General Court in 1830, and the next year was admitted to the bar.
He was a member in 1835 and 1836 of the State Senate and in 1837 and 1841 of the Lower House. In 1848 he moved to Boston; the following year he was made District Attorney of Massachusetts in return for the assistance he had given Zachary Taylor in the Whig convention that nominated him for President. He did not resume private practice until 1858.
He gradually acquired a reputation as an orator; when the Whig party disappeared, he became a Democrat, and as editor of the Demo- cratic "Daily Courier" did his best to prevent the Civil War. He remained editor until 1863, when he retired.
He wrote "The Grave of Byron," 1826; and the "Age of Gold," 1839-both books of poems; "The Dove and the Eagle," 1851; "Lyric Poems," 1854; "Julia," 1855; "Eastford, or Household Sketches," 1855; "Three Eras of New England," 1857; "The Union," 1860; "A Review of Mcclellan's Campaigns," 1863; "Ori- gins of the Late War," 1866; "Old New England Traits," 1873; and "Poems," in 1884.
He also translated Horace and Virgil, whose influence gave his prose dignity and grace.
He was three times married-to Sarah Miles Greenwood, of Newburyport, in 1834; to Emily Ashton, of Newburyport, in 1845; and to Adeline Parsons, of Boston, in 1864. He died in Newbury- port, May 16, 1885.
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Independent, honorable, simple and dignified, Lunt was also a pleasant and easy writer. His "Old New England Traits" contains many agreeable memories of his early days in Newburyport, among its large square houses, elm-lined streets, and pleasant slopes to the river.
The chief battle of his lifetime was his effort to avert the Civil War. Afterwards, in "The Origin of the Late War," he maintained that the negroes were better off as slaves than in the farce of freedom which came to them later. Garrison seemed to him comic; he even went so far as to declare that the famous mob which attacked him "was too good-natured to intend him any serious mischief." He was violently opposed to abolitionists in general, which won him disrepute as a defender of slavery. Particularly he opposed the activities of the British abolitionist, George Thompson, whose "ill-omened and ill- fated adventures" were undertaken, he claimed, in the hope of getting this country in war and thus recapturing for England her old trade supremacy.
Whatever stand he took, his writing was plausible, readable, clear and interesting, if without much color.
Next in chronological order, though first in importance, is Nathaniel Hawthorne, the greatest novelist of his time in America. He was born in Salem, July 4, 1804. His ancestor, Major William Hawthorne, had come over on the "Arbella," reaching Salem in 1630; and his descendants had lived there ever since. Carl Van Doren said :
"Nathaniel was the first Hawthorne to choose a sedentary calling, a choice which he made the more easily because the will to action had by this time faded out of the stock, to be suc- ceeded by a mild pride of blood and a quiet loyalty to the concerns of the mind."
After his father's death, when he was still a small child, his mother had plunged herself into an almost fantastic widowhood, remaining most of the time in her room. Nathaniel grew up in soli- tude, finding companionship only in books. By the time he was four- teen, he had read Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Clarendon, Froissart, Rousseau, and many other writers. The winter of his fourteenth year he spent in an even greater solitude-in the woods in Raymond, Maine, which he loved. He studied in Salem, and went to Bowdoin,
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SALEM-NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE'S BIRTHPLACE 27 Union Street, built before 1685
Courtesy of The Essex Institute
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where for the first time he knew the pleasures of association with con- temporaries, among whom were Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Franklin Pierce.
But he returned to Salem after his graduation, in 1825, and set- tled down once more into complete solitude, in the Herbert Street room, where he was later to write sadly to his wife, "so much of my lonely youth was wasted." For twelve years he did nothing but write ; with the exception of his annual short vagabondage about New Eng- land. His "American Notebooks," published after his death, show that he observed very narrowly what he saw; that he jotted every- thing down, and drew on it for his later books. He enjoyed the people he met on his wanderings, and seems to have had a decided talent for getting on with everyone.
Early in this period of seclusion he wrote "Seven Tales of My Native Land," which he destroyed because no one would publish it. In 1828 he himself published anonymously "Fanshawe," which was more or less his autobiography. Thereafter, he wrote frequently for "The Token," an annual whose publisher had admired "Fanshawe," and the "New England Magazine." In 1836 he was for seven months editor of the "American Magazine of Useful and Entertain- ing Knowledge."
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