USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > The story of Essex County, Volume II > Part 15
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"Uncle Tom's Cabin" was followed by a long series of novels, none of which attained the popularity of the first, but several of which
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were actually better than it. There was "Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp," 1856; "The Minister's Wooing," 1859; "The Pearl of Orr's Island" and "Agnes of Sorrento," in 1862; "A Reply to the Address of Thousands of Women of Great Britain and Ireland to the Sisters of the United States," 1863; "House and Home Papers," 1864; "Stories About Our Boys," 1865; "Little Foxes," 1866; "Reli- gious Poems," "Queer Little People," and "Daisy's First Winter," 1867; "The Chimney Corner" and "Men of Our Times," 1868; "Old Town Folks"; "New England Life" and "The American Woman's Home," 1869; "Lady Byron Vindicated"; "Little Pussy Willow," 1870; "Pink and White Tyranny"; "Sam Lawson's Fire- side Stories"; "My Wife and I," 1871; "Lives and Deeds of Our Self-made Men," 1872; "Palmetto Leaves" and "Women in Sacred History," 1873; "Betty's Bright Idea," "We and Our Neighbors," "Deacon Pitkin's Farm," and "Christ's Christmas Presents," 1875; "Footsteps of the Master" and "Captain Kidd's Money," 1876; "Poganuc People," 1878; "A Dog's Mission," I881.
Besides all this writing she had seven children. She died in Hart- ford, July, 1896, aged eighty-five.
Her sense of having a mission, of which her biographers spoke, is evident merely from the recital of the titles of her books. It was because of that sense that she felt she could speak for the women of the United States; it was because of her sense of duty that she felt called upon publicly to enter into the unsavory controversy over Lady Byron. She sought everywhere a spiritual meaning; when, as in "Agnes of Sorrento," she tried to imagine the past, it was the figure of Savonarola which she chose instinctively, because his passion for reform and his stern eloquence must have recalled to her Jonathan Edwards, whom her father reverenced.
Yet in spite of her preoccupation with moral issues, Mrs. Stowe is remarkable for her sincere and honest attempt to reproduce real life in her writings. Ludwig Lewisohn said of her :
"Mrs. Stowe struck fire because she had both the steel of passion and the flint of life. . ... Her passion for the truth she desired to convey made her regard with the power of that passion the realities which embodied her truth and use her imagination not in order to flee from reality but in order to
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embrace it to the point of pain. It was an imagination both sentimental and coarse. Yet because it sought deliberately to penetrate, to interpret and to heighten actual data of human experience, it achieved a density of vital substance that was, strictly speaking, a new thing in American letters. =
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" had sprung straight from her horror of what she had observed in Cincinnati. "The Minister's Wooing" was the outgrowth of her grief over the loss of her eldest and dearest son. And her best book of all, "Old Town Folks," was based on her knowledge of New England people. There is very little sentimental- izing in it, very little moralizing. Her sense, her kindliness, her sympathy, and above all her observation, make it still worth reading because it is true to life.
After "Uncle Tom," Mrs. Stowe became a minor deity; even Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward spoke of her as a "great and gracious lady." Yet, though she herself never doubted that she was a priestess, her good sense and humor and her honesty kept her human. Mary Abigail Dodge said of her :
"She glowed and was very simple, natural, agreeable, and entertaining., She is plain at first sight, but not after five minutes. Her face is very attractive and her smile charming and sometimes very expressive. . ... She says he (her hus- band) has been round at a great rate trading on female sensi- bilities and making people think he was the most abused man in the world. "
Again apart from the anti-slavery issue, which preoccupied most of his contemporaries, is the figure of Jones Very, the least moral- izing, most nearly mystical of the Essex County poets of his time. He was born in Salem, August 28, 1813. He made several voyages to Europe in his childhood with his father, who was a sea captain. He was graduated from Harvard in 1836. From his graduation till 1838 he was a tutor of Greek at Harvard.
His "Essays and Poems" was published in 1839. Though he was licensed as a Unitarian preacher by the Cambridge Association in 1843, he was never ordained over a congregation, perhaps because of his retiring nature. He preached occasionally, but for the most part lived very quietly in Salem, writing now and then for the "Christian
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Register," the "Monthly Religious Magazine," and the "Salem Gazette." He died in Salem, May S, ISSO, at the age of sixty-six.
His contemporaries knew him chiefly for his poem on the "Colum- bine." But though this shows genuine skill in handling the Shakes- pearian sonnet, a deep love of nature, and a music which the custom- ary hexameter of his last line makes still more pleasing-
"My weary eyes shall close like folding flowers in sleep" ---
yet it is by no means a great poem, so conventional is its imagery.
It is chiefly as a mystic in an age of sentiment that Jones Very deserves to be remembered; every now and then, in his poetry, there "dawns the Invisible."
"Thou shalt not mark with narrow walls Thine own vast being's scope, 'Tis farther back than Memory calls, Nor is it barred by Hope.
"Nor fetter thou with human creed, The symbol of an hour, The mind that God's own word has freed, And His own Spirit's power.
"The wind, the tide, the growing grass, Thy will cannot control, Then fix no bounds it shall not pass To the free, living, soul."
Like Very, a man of religion and a native of Salem, Charles Timothy Brooks was born June 20, 1813. He went to Salem Latin Grammar School and then to Harvard, from which he was graduated at nineteen, and three years later from Harvard Divinity School. He began preaching in Nahant in 1835; in 1837 he settled in New- port, Rhode Island, to spend the rest of his life there. In October of the same year he married Harriet Lyman Hazard.
For the rest of his life, besides his career as a clergyman, he made a name for himself as a translator and a poet, and he also contributed to all the magazines of the day.
Among his original writings were: "Aquidnec and Other Poems," 1848; "The Controversy Touching the Old Stone Mill," a pamphlet of Newport interest, 1851 ; "Songs of Field and Flood," 1857; "The
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Simplicity of Christ's Teachings," a collection of his sermons, 1859; "Roman Rhymes," 1869; "Puck's Nightly Pranks," 1871; "The History of the Unitarian Church in Newport," 1875; and "Chan- ning, a Centennial Memory," 1880. He died in Newport, June 14, 1883.
His poems are graceful and fluent, with neither bombast nor origi- nality. Sometimes they had a certain flavor-as, for instance, his address to Salem, curiously reminiscent of Rupert Brooke's "Grant- chester":
"Does the old green Gibralter cart still stop Up in Old Paved Street, at Aunt Hannah's shop? Beside Cold Spring drop the sweet acorns still ? Do boys dig flagroot now beneath Legge's hill ? "
But all too often he suffered the taint of the pulpit :
"Relentless Time, dear friends, has breathed again Her wintry mood on Nature and on men."
His translations were widely read and served a great many for introduction to German literature. Among the poets whose work he translated were Schiller, Goethe, Richter, Kortum, Leopold Schefer, Busch, Auerbach, and Ruckert.
Gentle and sympathetic, a graceful and ready talker, with a sense of humor, he was an excellent companion.
Exactly contemporary with Brooks was Epes Sargent, whose birth and death took place in the same years as those of Brooks. He was born in Gloucester, September 27, 1813. When he was a child he traveled with his father in Russia. At Harvard he was one of the editors of the "Harvard Collegian." He wrote for the "Boston Daily Advertiser and Atlas" and, moving to New York in 1839, he was for a while assistant editor of the "New York Mirror." In 1846 he was made one of the editors of the "Boston Evening Transcript." He married Elizabeth Weld, of Roxbury.
In 1837 a number of his plays were published: "The Bride of Genoa," "Velasco," "Change Makes Change," and the "Priestess." In 1847 he published "Songs of the Sea"; in 1869 "The Woman Who Dared" and "Life on the Ocean Wave"; in 1840, "Wealth and Worth," and in 1841 a series of stories for young people, "What's
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to Be Done, or The Will and The Way." In 1845, "Fleetwood, or the Stain of a Birth" appeared; in 1863, "Peculiar, a Tale of the Great Transition"; in 1843, the "Life and Services of Henry Clay"; in 1847, "American Adventure by Land and Sea"; in 1856, "The Critic Criticized" ; in 1857, "Arctic Adventures by Sea and Land"; in 1861, "Original Dialogues," and in 1880, "The Scientific Basis of Spiritualism."
He edited a series of educational works, the lives of Collins, Campbell, Goldsmith, Gray, Hood, Rogers, Franklin, Horace, and a book of modern drama.
His style was simple and readable, but without distinction, and his books could not hope to survive their age. He died in Boston, Decem- ber 31, 1880.
Though short her life and brief her list of books, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was one of the most talented and lovable of Essex County authors. She was born in Andover, August 13, 1815, and educated there. When she was twenty-seven she married the Reverend Austin Phelps. They lived in Boston till 1848; then they moved back to Andover, where she lived for the rest of her short life.
At an early age she began to write short stories of New England life under the pen-name H. Trusta-the last name, of course, being an anagram of her maiden name, Stuart. Nothing was published in book form until 1850, when the Kitty Brown series came out, and was instantly popular. It was followed the next year by "Sunnyside," which sold 100,000 copies in one year, "A Peep at Number Five," and "The Angel Over the Right Shoulder," and in 1852 by "The Tell Tale." She had never been well; all her life she had headaches and was for some length of time partially blind. Her daughter said of her :
"Her last book and last baby came together and killed her. She lived one of those rich and piteous lives such as only gifted women know; torn by the civil war of the dual nature which can be given to women only."
She died November 30, 1852, and her bereaved husband brought out a memoir of her the next year, called "The Last Leaf from Sunny- side," and containing some of her unpublished work. This memoir is chiefly remarkable for the philosophy with which he accepts her death
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in childbirth after a life of invalidism. Her own story, "The Angel Over the Right Shoulder," shows that, though the sweetest and most wifely of women, she was not without her understanding of her own tragedy. It is the story, simply written, yet extremely touching, of a woman who tried to write, and was expected to do everything else first if not simultaneously. She ends by being able to persuade her- self that the care of her house and children and unconsciously demand- ing husband are as important in the sight of God as her writing -- and yet she bends over her daughter's golden curls and hopes that she, too, will not know the same struggle.
It was perhaps because of her example that that daughter, Eliza- beth Stuart Phelps Ward, obtained the freedom she herself had wanted, and did not marry till she was forty-four.
Edwin Percy Whipple, the first of Essex County's critics, was born in Gloucester, March 8, 1819. He moved to Salem, where he was educated in the public schools. Employed in a broker's office in Boston, he read a poem before the Mercantile Library Association in 1840. This began his long career as a lecturer in the course of which he spoke at many of the lyceums all over the country, and many of the colleges. He was also a constant and voluminous contributor to magazines. In 1847 he married Charlotte Hastings.
Chief among his published works as: "Essays and Reviews," 1848; "Literature and Life," 1849; "Character and Characteristic Men," 1866; "Success and Its Conditions," 1871; "The Literature of the Age of Elizabeth," which was delivered as Lowell Institute Lectures; and "Recollections of Eminent Men," 1887. He died in Boston, June 16, 1886.
By some Whipple was considered the best critic of his day. He was concerned with everything: with slavery, with servants, with "Lord" Bacon, and with the evils of swearing. He was a good, but not brilliant reviewer, reflecting the opinions of his time, yet tem- perate, judicious and with a great deal of intellectual sympathy. Though Lord Byron stood for everything that his contemporaries were expected to shudder at, Whipple was able to see that he was a great writer; yet he gave most of his attention to Byron's bitterness and impiety and what he characterized as the "obscenity" of his writ- ings and his life.
Sculptor, novelist and poet, William Wetmore Story was among the most versatile of the sons of Essex County. The son of a man
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who had been Justice of the Supreme Court at thirty-two, he was born in Salem, February 12, 1819. When he was ten the family moved to Boston. He was graduated from Harvard in 1838 and from Har- vard Law School in 1840, when he was admitted to the bar in Boston. At twenty-three he married Emelyn Eldredge. By 1847 he had pub- lished five volumes on law. But he was also a frequent contributor of prose and verse to the "Boston Miscellany," and in 1847 pub- lished a volume of verse. In 1848 he went to Rome, where he gave up his legal career and devoted all his time to sculpture and writing. He was also an accomplished musician.
He wrote a life of his father in 1851; another volume of verse came out in 1856; in 1862, "Roba di Roma"; in 1869, "Graffiti d'Italia"; in 1875, "The Tragedy of Nero"; in 1883, "He and She of a Poet's Portfolio"; in 1855, "Fiammetta"; in 1890, "Conversa- tions in a Studio"; and, in 1891, "Excursions in Art and Letters." He died in Vallombrosa, October 7, 1895.
Besides his own vivacious letters, Story is most readily to be found again in the charming and nostalgic "William Wetmore Story and His Friends," written by Henry James. James greatly regrets for Story his voluntary exile to Rome. "In London, in Boston, he would have had to live with his conception, there being nothing else about him of the same color or quality. In Rome, Florence, Siena, there was too much."
Charmed by this glamorous life, dividing his energies-though always with charm and taste, to the delight of his friends-among manifold activities, Story never achieved first rank in any of the arts which he practiced. A close friend of Browning, he could not help being influenced by him. Yet James says :
"The tone achieved is as little Browningesque as possible. Story is limpid as far as he goes-is crystalline; he is simple, in fine, where Browning bristles with complexity. He arrives, naturally, at a much lower degree of intensity, but here is at any rate nothing either presumptuous or ridiculous in his han- dling of the bow. He bends it, and the arrow goes straight enough."
Some of his poems, for instance, "Giannone" and "Ginevra da Siena," achieve felicity; but for the most part they have only facility.
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He shares the fate of all other excellent talkers, for such his "Con- versations in a Studio," ranging in subject from auctions of china in Paris through the views of the life to come held by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, taking in all art and literature by the way, show him to have been.
James Parton, the most successful biographer of his generation, was born in Canterbury, England, on February 9, 1822, but came to New York when he was five. He went to the academy in White Plains, and after graduation remained for some time as assistant teacher. In 1842 he learned that a legacy had been left him in Eng- land; he collected it and at once spent it in making the grand tour. For the next four years he taught school in Philadelphia.
Impressed by his essay proving that "Jane Eyre" had been writ- ten by a woman, N. P. Willis gave young Parton a job on the "New York Home Journal" at ten dollars a week. From 1848 to 1854 Parton did hack work for Willis; then fortune came his way. He remarked to a publisher that a life of Horace Greeley could be made as popular as Franklin's autobiography; the publisher advanced him the money to write the book. After a year of study Parton produced his book; and it at once justified his predictions. No other biog- rapher had had the showmanship and the daring to write a realistic biography of a living man. James Parton's career was assured.
The writings of his next thirty years were voluminous and almost invariably popular. They include: "The Humorous Poetry of the English Language," 1856; "The Life and Times of Aaron Burr," 1857; "The Life and Times of Andrew Jackson," 1860; "General Butler in New Orleans," 1863; "The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin," 1864; "The Life and Times of John Jacob Astor," 1865; "How New York Is Governed," 1866; "Famous Americans of Recent Times," 1867; "The People's Book of Biography," 1868; and also "Smoking and Drinking"; "The Danish Islands: Are We Bound in Honor to Pay for them?" 1869; "Topics of the Time," 1871; and also "Triumphs of Enterprise, Ingenuity and Public Spirit," 1871; "Words of Washington," 1872; "Fanny Fern, a Memorial Volume," 1873; "Caricature and Other Comic Arts," 1877; and also "Le Par- nasse Francais : Life of Voltaire," 1881; "Noted Women of Europe and America," 1883; "Captains of Industry," 1884; "Some Noted Princes, Authors, and Statesmen of Our times," 1885.
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He was also a constant contributor to the "Youth's Companion," the "North American Review," the "New York Ledger," and the "Atlantic Monthly."
When he was still on the "New York Home Journal," Parton had disagreed violently with Willis over the literary merits of Willis' sister, Sara Payson Willis Eldredge, who had achieved some fame as Fanny Fern. When Willis refused to publish her writing, Parton left the "Journal," and impetuously married the authoress in January, 1856. Eleven years older than he, an invalid, and not an agreeable one, she made his life miserable, though he was extremely loyal to her, until she died in 1872. Parton spent the next two summers in New- buryport, then, in 1875, left New York to make a permanent home in Newburyport. In 1876 he married his stepdaughter, Ellen Willis Eldredge, unaware that the marriage was void in Massachusetts. It was with some difficulty that it was ultimately legalized. They had two children, and the rest of Parton's life was very tranquil. He died in Newburyport, October 17, 1891.
Though certainly not a great writer of history, Parton is very readable, full of lifelike details, which manage to create a human being. He is thorough and honest, if not profound, and, though touched with coyness of manner, is yet entertaining.
Lucy Larcom, poet and editor, was born in Beverly, March 5, 1824. Her parents, she said, were "people of integrity and pro- found faith in God," who left her an "inheritance of hard work and the privilege of poverty." From her earliest childhood she read con- stantly, especially poetry and books on religion.
In 1835 she moved to Lowell and went to work in the mills there. By 1840 her sister, Emeline, was editing the "Operatives' Magazine," which was written entirely by the intelligent New England girls who then comprised the millworkers, and Lucy was the chief contributor.
She became a district school teacher in 1846 in Looking Glass Prairie, Illinois, and then in various other small pioneer villages. From 1849 to 1852 she studied and taught in Monticello Seminary, near Alton, Illinois, and then from 1854 to 1862 taught in Wheaton Seminary, which was then not yet a college.
Her first work to be published in book form was "Similitudes from Ocean and Prairie," a collection of prose poems, in 1854. Then her "Call to Kansas," the following year, won her the prize of the
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New England Emigrant Aid Company. Her first collection of poems, in 1869, contained the poem which made her famous: "Hannah Binding Shoes." Rather reminiscent of Whittier, it was often attributed to him:
"Poor lone Hannah
Sitting at the window binding shoes,
Faded, wrinkled
Sitting, stitching in a mournful muse. Bright-eyed beauty once was she, When the bloom was on the tree;
Spring and winter,
Hannah's at the window binding shoes."
So great was the demand for her poems that, in 1884, a house- hold edition was issued. "A New England Girlhood," the story of her own youth, was published in 1889. In 1865 she became editor of "Our Young Folks," and through this came to associate with Whit- tier. With him she compiled an anthology, "Child Life," in 1871, and in 1883 the more ambitious "Songs of Three Centuries." Her last book, "The Unseen Friend," showed a new mysticism creeping into her views of religion.
After she left Wheaton she spent the rest of her life in Boston and Beverly and died in Boston, April 17, 1893.
Her poems are sententious, their themes well worn and their rhythms obvious. But "A New England Girlhood" is really charm- ing, and brings back still the flavor of those far-off days. Of Beverly she said :
"The town used to wear a delightful air of drowsiness as if she had stretched herself out for an afternoon nap, with her head toward her old mother Salem and her whole length reclining towards the sea, till she felt at her feet, through her green robes, the dip of the deep water at the Farms."
And simple words can hardly be used with more taste to make more music than in this passage :
"Green parrots went scolding and laughing down the thimbleberry hedges that bordered the cornfields, as much at home out of doors as within. Java sparrows and canaries and
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other tropical songbirds poured their music out of sunny win- dows into the street, delighting the ears of passing school children long before the robins came."
Samuel Thomas Pickard, chiefly known as Whittier's biographer, was born in Rowley, March 1, 1828. When he was still a small child his family moved to Auburn, Maine. When he was sixteen he went to Portland and was apprenticed to a printer. In 1852 he worked with Benjamin P. Shillaber in Boston on "The Carpet Bag"; then he returned to Portland, where the next year he became editor with E. P. Weston, of the "Eclectic." Two years later the "Eclectic" merged with the "Portland Transcript." Pickard became an editor and joint owner. For nearly forty years he worked on the "Tran- script," helping to make it one of the most influential newspapers in New England.
He married on April 19, 1876, Elizabeth Hussey Whittier, the niece of John Greenleaf Whittier, whose close friend he became. When he retired from the "Transcript" he went to live near Whittier in Amesbury. Appointed Whittier's literary executor and biog- rapher, he wrote his "Life and Letters" in 1894. Modest, quiet, without any attempt at eulogy, it is just the sort of biography Whit- tier would have liked.
It was followed, in 1897, by "Hawthorne's First Diary," an account of a literary discovery which later, fearing that it was not genuine, he withdrew. He wrote, in 1900, "Whittier As Politician," and in 1904, "Whittier Land, a Handbook of North Essex," both pleasant, self-effacing, straightforward books. He died in Amesbury, February 12, 1915.
Mary Abigail Dodge, who like Whittier and Garrison fought against slavery, and like Lucy Larcom was an editor of "Our Young Folks," chose as her pseudonym Gail Hamilton, because, she said, her own name "actually hurts my mouth to speak, it is so rough."
"Phœbus --- what a name
To fill the speaking trump of future fame!"
She was born in Hamilton, March 31, 1833; her ancestors had lived for two centuries in Essex County. She was educated in the Ipswich Female Seminary and at twenty-one became a teacher of English at the high school in Hartford, Connecticut. She remained
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there for four years, writing for the newspapers all the time. She was a regular contributor to the "National Era," the anti-slavery paper. The editor, Dr. Gamaliel Bailey, was so struck with her writ- ing that he invited her to Washington to live in his family and be governess to his children. She went to Washington in September, 1858, and stayed there for two years, still contributing her vigorous and ready articles to the "National Era." She came home because of her mother's health and stayed with her until her death in 1868. Meantime, she was, from 1865 to 1867, one of the editors of "Our Young Folks," together with Lucy Larcom.
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