doubtless delightful; yet if it was friendly to the suggested or
imagined thing it promoted among us much less directly, as I have
already hinted, the act of choice--choice as to the "career" for
example, with a view of the usual proceedings thereupon consequent. I
marvel at the manner in which the door appears to have been held or at
least left open to us for experiment, though with a tendency to close,
the oddest yet most inveterately perceptible movement in that sense,
before any very earnest proposition in particular. I have no remembrance
at all of marked prejudices on our father's part, but I recall repeated
cases, in his attitude to our young affairs, of a disparagement
suggested as by stirred memories of his own; the instance most present
to me being his extreme tepidity in the matter of William's, or in fact
of my, going, on our then American basis, to college. I make out in him,
and at the time made out, a great revulsion of spirit from that incurred
experience in his own history, a revulsion I think moreover quite
independent of any particular or instrinsic attributes of the seat of
learning involved in it. Union College, Schenectady, New York, the scene
of his personal experiment and the natural resort, in his youth, of
comparatively adjacent Albanians, might easily have offered at that time
no very rare opportunities--few were the American country colleges that
then had such to offer; but when, after years, the question arose for
his sons he saw it in I scarce know what light of associational or
"subjective" dislike. He had the disadvantage--unless indeed it was much
more we who had it--of his having, after many changes and detachments,
ceased to believe in the Schenectady resource, or to revert to it
sentimentally, without his forming on the other hand, with his boys to
place, any fonder presumption or preference. There comes out to me, much
bedimmed but recognisable, the image of a day of extreme youth on which,
during a stay with our grandmother at Albany, we achieved, William and
I, with some confused and heated railway effort, a pious pilgrimage to
the small scholastic city--pious by reason, I clearly remember, of a
lively persuasion on my brother's part that to Union College, at some
indefinite future time, we should both most naturally and delightedly
repair. We invoked, I gather, among its scattered shades, fairly vague
to me now, the loyalty that our parent appeared to have dropped by the
way--even though our attitude about it can scarce have been prematurely
contentious; the whole vision is at any rate to-day bathed and blurred
for me in the air of some charmed and beguiled dream, that of the
flushed good faith of an hour of crude castle-building. We were helped
to build, on the spot, by an older friend, much older, as I remember
him, even than my brother, already a member of the college and, as it
seemed, greatly enjoying his life and those "society" badges and
trinkets with which he reappears to me as bristling and twinkling quite
to the extinction of his particular identity. This is lost, like
everything else, in the mere golden haze of the little old-time autumn
adventure. Wondrous to our sensibility may well have been the October
glamour--if October it was, and if it was not it ought to have been!--of
that big brave region of the great State over which the shade of
Fenimore Cooper's Mohawks and Mohicans (if this be not a pleonasm) might
still have been felt to hang. The castle we had built, however,
crumbled--there were plenty of others awaiting erection; these too
successively had their hour, but I needn't at this time stoop to pick up
their pieces. I see moreover vividly enough how it might have been that,
at this stage, our parents were left cold by the various appeal, in our
interest, of Columbia, Harvard and Yale. Hard by, at Providence, in the
Newport time, was also "Brown"; but I recover no connection in which
that mystic syllable swept our sky as a name to conjure with. Our
largest licence somehow didn't stray toward Brown. It was to the same
tune not conceivable that we should have been restored for educational
purposes to the swollen city, the New York of our childhood, where we
had then so tumbled in and out of school as to exhaust the measure, or
as at least greatly to deflower the image, of our teachability on that
ground. Yale, off our beat from every point of view, was as little to be
thought of, and there was moreover in our father's imagination no grain
of susceptibility to what might have been, on the general ground,
"socially expected." Even Harvard, clearly--and it was perhaps a trifle
odd--moved him in our interest as little as Schenectady could do; so
that, for authority, the voice of social expectation would have had to
sound with an art or an accent of which it had by no means up to that
time learned roundabout us the trick. This indeed (it comes to saying)
is something that, so far as our parents were concerned, it would never
have learned. They were, from other preoccupations, unaware of any such
pressure; and to become aware would, I think, primarily have been for
them to find it out of all proportion to the general pitch of
prescription. We were not at that time, when it came to such claims, in
presence of persuasive, much less of impressive, social forms and
precedents--at least those of us of the liberated mind and the really
more curious culture were not; the more curious culture, only to be
known by the positive taste of it, was nowhere in the air, nowhere
seated or embodied.
Which reflections, as I perhaps too loosely gather them in, refresh at
any rate my sense of how we in particular of our father's house actually
profited more than we lost, if the more curious culture was in question,
by the degree to which we were afloat and disconnected; since there were
at least luxuries of the spirit in this quite as much as
drawbacks--given a social order (so far as it _was_ an order) that found
its main ideal in a "strict attention to business," that is to buying
and selling over a counter or a desk, and in such an intensity of the
traffic as made, on the part of all involved, for close localisation. To
attend strictly to business was to be invariably _there_, on a certain
spot in a certain place; just as to be nowhere in particular, to _have_
to be nowhere, told the queer tale of a lack or of a forfeiture, or
possibly even of a state of intrinsic unworthiness. I have already
expressed how few of these elements of the background we ourselves had
ever had either to add to or to subtract from, and how this of itself
did after a fashion "place" us in the small Newport colony of the
despoiled and disillusioned, the mildly, the reminiscentially desperate.
As easy as might be, for the time, I have also noted, was our footing
there; but I have not, for myself, forgotten, or even now outlived, the
particular shade of satisfaction to be taken in one's thus being in New
England without being of it. To have originally been of it, or still to
have had to be, affected me, I recall, as a case I should have
regretted--unless it be more exact to say that I thought of the
condition as a danger after all escaped. Long would it take to tell why
it figured as a danger, and why that impression was during the several
following years much more to gain than to lose intensity. The question
was to fall into the rear indeed, with ever so many such secondary
others, during the War, and for reasons effective enough; but it was
afterwards to know a luxury of emergence--this, I mean, while one still
"cared," in general, as one was sooner or later to stop caring.
Infinitely interesting to recover, in the history of a mind, for those
concerned, these movements of the spirit, these tides and currents of
growth--though under the inconvenience for the historian of such
ramifications of research that here at any rate I feel myself warned
off. There appeared to us at Newport the most interesting, much, of the
Albany male cousins, William James Temple--coming, oddly enough, first
from Yale and then from Harvard; so that by contact and example the
practicability of a like experience might have been, and doubtless was,
put well before us. "Will" Temple, as we were in his short life too
scantly to know him, had made so luckless, even if so lively a start
under one alma mater that the appeal to a fresh parentship altogether
appears to have been judged the best remedy for his case: he entered
Harvard jumping, if I mistake not, a couple of years of the
undergraduate curriculum, and my personal memory of these reappearances
is a mere recapture of admiration, of prostration, before him. The
dazzled state, under his striking good looks and his manly charm, was
the common state; so that I disengage from it no presumption of a
particular plea playing in our own domestic air for his temporary
Cambridge setting; he was so much too radiant and gallant and personal,
too much a character and a figure, a splendid importance in himself, to
owe the least glamour to settings; an advantage that might have seemed
rather to be shed on whatever scene by himself in consenting to light it
up. He made all life for the hour a foreground, and one that we none of
us would have quitted for a moment while he was there.
In that form at least I see him, and no revival of those years so puts
to me the interesting question, so often aimlessly returned upon in
later life, of the amount of truth in this or that case of young
confidence in a glory to come--for another than one's self; of the
likelihood of the wonders so flatteringly forecast. Many of our
estimates were monstrous magnifications--though doing us even at that
more good than harm; so that one isn't even sure that the happiest
histories were to have been those of the least liberal mistakes. I like
at any rate to think of our easy overstrainings--the possible flaw in
many of which was not indeed to be put to the proof. That was the case
for the general, and for every particular, impression of Will Temple,
thanks to his early death in battle--at Chancellorsville, 1863; he
having, among the quickened forces of the time, and his father's record
helping him, leaped to a captaincy in the regular Army; but I cling to
the idea that the siftings and sortings of life, had he remained subject
to them, would still have left him the lustre that blinds and subdues. I
even do more, at this hour; I ask myself, while his appearance and my
personal feeling about it live for me again, what possible aftertime
could have kept up the pitch of my sentiment--aftertime either of his
or of mine. Blest beyond others, I think as we look back, the
admirations, even the fondest (and which indeed were not of their nature
fond?) that were not to know to their cost the inevitable test or
strain; they are almost the only ones, of the true high pitch, that,
without broken edges or other tatters to show, fold themselves away
entire and secure, even as rare lengths of precious old stuff, in the
scented chest of our savings. So great misadventure have too often known
at all events certain of those that were to come to trial. The others
are the _residual_, those we must keep when we can, so to be sure at
least of a few, sacrificing as many possible mistakes and misproportions
as need be to pay but for two or three of them. There could be no
mistake about Gus Barker, who threw himself into the fray, that is into
the cavalry saddle, as he might into a match at baseball (football being
then undreamt of), and my last reminiscence of whom is the sight of him,
on a brief leave for a farewell to his Harvard classmates after he had
got his commission, crossing with two or three companions the expanse of
Harvard Square that faced the old Law School, of which I found myself
for that year (1862-63) a singularly alien member. I was afterwards
sharply to regret the accident by which I on that occasion missed speech
of him; but my present vision of his charming latent agility, which any
motion showed, of his bright-coloured wagging head and of the large
gaiety of the young smile that made his handsome teeth shine out, is
after all the years but the more happily uneffaced. The point of all
which connections, however, is that they somehow managed to make in the
parental view no straight links for us with the matter-of-course of
college. There were accidents too by the aid of which they failed of
this the more easily. It comes to me that, for my own part, I thought of
William at the time as having, or rather as so much more than having,
already graduated; the effect of contact with his mind and talk, with
the free play of his spirit and the irrepressible brush of his humour,
couldn't have been greater had he carried off fifty honours. I felt in
him such authority, so perpetually quickened a state of intellect and
character, that the detail or the literal side of the question never so
much as came up for me: I must have made out that to plenty of
graduates, or of the graduating, nothing in the nature of such
appearances attached. I think of our father moreover as no less affected
by a like impression; so extremely, so immensely disposed do I see him
to generalise his eldest son's gifts as by the largest, fondest
synthesis, and not so much proceed upon them in any one direction as
proceed _from_ them, as it were, in all.
Little as such a view might have lent itself to application, my
brother's searching discovery during the summer of 1861 that his
vocation was not "after all" in the least satisfyingly for Art, took on
as a prompt sequel the recognition that it was quite positively and
before everything for Science, physical Science, strenuous Science in
all its exactitude; with the opportunity again forthcoming to put his
freshness of faith to the test. I had presumed to rejoice before at his
adoption of the studio life, that offering as well possible contacts for
myself; and yet I recall no pang for his tergiversation, there being
nothing he mightn't have done at this or at any other moment that I
shouldn't have felt as inevitable and found in my sense of his previous
age some happy and striking symptom or pledge of. As certain as that he
had been all the while "artistic" did it thus appear that he had been at
the same time quite otherwise inquiring too--addicted to "experiments"
and the consumption of chemicals, the transfusion of mysterious liquids
from glass to glass under exposure to lambent flame, the cultivation of
stained fingers, the establishment and the transport, in our wanderings,
of galvanic batteries, the administration to all he could persuade of
electric shocks, the maintenance of marine animals in splashy aquaria,
the practice of photography in the room I for a while shared with him
at Boulogne, with every stern reality of big cumbrous camera, prolonged
exposure, exposure mostly of myself, darkened development, also
interminable, and ubiquitous brown blot. Then there had been also the
constant, as I fearfully felt it, the finely speculative and boldly
disinterested absorption of curious drugs. No livelier remembrance have
I of our early years together than this inveteracy, often appalling to a
nature so incurious as mine in _that_ direction, of his interest in the
"queer" or the incalculable effects of things. There was apparently for
him no possible effect whatever that mightn't be more or less rejoiced
in as such--all exclusive of its relation to other things than merely
knowing. There recurs to me withal the shamelessness of my own
indifference--at which I also, none the less, I think, wondered a
little; as if by so much as it hadn't been given me to care for visibly
provoked or engineered phenomena, by that same amount was I open to
those of the mysteriously or insidiously aggressive, the ambushed or
suffered sort. Vivid to me in any case is still the sense of how quite
shiningly light, as an activity and an appeal, he had seemed to make
everything he gave himself to; so that at first, until the freshness of
it failed, he flung this iridescent mantle of interest over the then so
grey and scant little scene of the Harvard (the Lawrence) Scientific
School, where in the course of the months I had had a glimpse or two of
him at work. Early in the autumn of 1861 he went up from Newport to
Cambridge to enter that institution; in which thin current rather than
in the ostensibly more ample began to flow his long connection with
Harvard, gathering in time so many affluents. His letters from Cambridge
during the next couple of years, many of them before me now, breathe, I
think, all the experience the conditions could have begotten at the
best; they mark the beginning of those vivacities and varieties of
intellectual and moral reaction which were for the rest of his life to
be the more immeasurably candid and vivid, the more numerous above all,
and the more interesting and amusing, the closer view one had of him.
That of a certainty; yet these familiar pages of youth testify most of
all for me perhaps to the forces of amenity and spontaneity, the happy
working of all relations, in our family life. In such parts of them as I
may cite this will shine sufficiently through--and I shall take for
granted thus the interest of small matters that have perhaps but that
reflected light to show. It is in a letter to myself, of that September,
dated "Drear and Chill Abode," that he appears to have celebrated the
first steps of his initiation.
Sweet was your letter and grateful to my eyes. I had gone in a
mechanical way to the P.O. not hoping for anything (though "on espere
alors qu'on desespere toujours,") and, finding nothing, was turning
heavily away when a youth modestly tapped me and, holding out an
envelope inscribed in your well-known character, said, "Mr. J., this was
in our box!" 'Twas the young Pascoe, the joy of his mother--but the
graphic account I read in the letter he gave me of the sorrow of my
mother almost made me shed tears on the floor of the P.O. Not that on
reflection I should dream----! for reflection shows me a future in which
she shall regard my vacation visits as "on the whole" rather troublesome
than otherwise; or at least when she shall feel herself as blest in the
trouble I spare her when absent as in the glow of pride and happiness
she feels at the sight of me when present. But she needn't fear I can
ever think of _her_ when absent with such equanimity. I oughtn't to
"joke on such a serious subject," as Bobby would say though; for I have
had several pangs since being here at the thought of all I have left
behind at Newport--especially gushes of feeling about the _place_. I
haven't for one minute had the feeling of being at home here. Something
in my quarters precludes the possibility of it, though what this is I
don't suppose I can describe to you.
As I write now even, writing itself being a cosy cheerful-looking
amusement, and an argand gas-burner with a neat green shade merrily
singing beside me, I still feel unsettled. I write on a round table in
the middle of the room, with a fearful red and black cloth. Before me I
see another such-covered table of oblong shape against the wall, capped
by a cheap looking-glass and flanked by two windows, curtainless and
bleak, whose shades of linen flout the air as the sportive wind impels
them. To the left are two other such windows, with a horse-hair sofa
between them, and at my back a fifth window and a vast wooden
mantel-piece with nothing to relieve its nakedness but a large cast,
much plumbago'd, of a bust of Franklin. On my right the Bookcase,
imposing and respectable with its empty drawers and with my little array
of printed wisdom covering nearly _one_ of the shelves. I hear the
people breathe as they go past in the street, and the roll and jar of
the horse-cars is terrific. I have accordingly engaged the other room
from Mrs. Pascoe, with the little sleeping-room upstairs. It looks
infinitely more cheerful than this, and if I don't find the grate
sufficient I can easily have a Franklin stove put up. But she says the
grate will make an oven of it.... John Ropes I met the other day at
Harry Quincy's room, and was very much pleased with him. Don't fail to
send on Will Temple's letters to him and to Herbert Mason, which I left
in one of the library's mantelpiece jars, to use the Portuguese idiom.
Storrow Higginson has been very kind to me, making enquiries about
tables etc. We went together this morning to the house of the Curator of
the Gray collection of Engravings, which is solemnly to unfold its
glories to me to-morrow. He is a most serious stately German gentleman,
Mr. Thies by name, fully sensible of the deep vital importance of his
treasures and evidently thinking a visit to them a great affair--to
_me_. Had I known how great, how tremendous and formal, I hardly think I
should have ventured to call. Tom Ward pays me a visit almost every
evening. Poor Tom seems a-cold too. His deafness keeps him from making
acquaintances. Professor Eliot, at the School, is a fine fellow, I
suspect; a man who if he resolves to do a thing won't be prevented. I
find analysis very interesting _so far_! The Library has a
reading-room, where they take all the magazines; so I shan't want for
the Rev. des 2 M. I remain with unalterable sentiments of devotion ever,
my dear H., your Big Brother Bill.
This record of further impressions closely and copiously followed.
Your letter this morning was such a godsend that I hasten to
respond a line or two, though I have no business to--for I have a
fearful lesson to-morrow and am going to Boston to-night to hear
Agassiz lecture (12 lectures on "Methods in Nat. Hist."), so that I
will only tell you that I am very well and my spirits just getting
good. Miss Upham's table is much pleasanter than the other.
Professor F. J. Child is a great joker--he's a little flaxen-headed
boy of about 40. There is a nice old lady boarder, another man of
about 50, of aristocratic bearing, who interests me much, and 3
intelligent students. At the other table was no conversation at
all; the fellows had that American solemnity, called each other
Sir, etc. I cannot tell you, dearest Mother, how your account of
your Sunday dinner and of your feelings thereat brought tears to my
eyes. Give Father my ardent love and cover with kisses the round
fair face of the most kiss-worthy Alice. Then kiss the Aunt till
you get tired, and get all the rest of them to kiss _you_ till you
cry hold enough!
This morning as I was busy over the 10th page of a letter to Wilky
in he popped and made my labour of no account. I had intended to go
and see him yesterday, but found Edward Emerson and Tom Ward were
going, and so thought he would have too much of a good thing. But
he walked over this morning with, or rather without them, for he
went astray and arrived very hot and dusty. I gave him a bath and
took him to dinner, and he is now gone to see Andrew Robeson and E.
E. His plump corpusculus looks as always. I write in my new parlour
whither I moved yesterday. You have no idea what an improvement it
is on the old affair--worth double the cost, and the little bedroom
under the roof is perfectly delicious, with a charming outlook on
little back yards with trees and pretty old brick walls. The sun is
upon _this_ room from earliest dawn till late in the afternoon--a
capital thing in winter. I like Miss Upham's very much. Dark
"aristocratic" dining-room, with royal cheer. "Fish, roast beef,
veal cutlets, pigeons!" says the splendid, tall, noble-looking,
white-armed, black-eyed Juno of a handmaid as you sit down. And for
dessert a choice of three, _three_, darling Mother, of the most
succulent, unctuous (no, not unctuous, unless you imagine a
celestial unction without the oil) pie-like confections, always 2
platesful--my eye! She has an admirable chemical, not mechanical,
combination of cake and jam and cream which I recommend to Mother
if she is ever at a loss; though there is no well-stored pantry
like that of good old Kay Street, or if there is it exists not for
miserable me.
This chemical analysis is so bewildering at first that I am
"muddled and bet" and have to employ almost all my time reading up.
Agassiz is evidently a great favourite with his Boston audience and
feels it himself. But he's an admirable earnest lecturer, clear as
day, and his accent is most fascinating. Jeffries Wyman's lectures
on Comp. Anatomy of Verts. promise to be very good; prosy perhaps a
little and monotonous, but plain and well-arranged and nourris.
Eliot I have not seen much more of; I don't believe he is a _very_
accomplished chemist, but can't tell yet. We are only about 12 in
the Laboratory, so that we have a very cosy time. I expect to have
a winter of "crowded life." I can be as independent as I please,
and want to live regardless of the good or bad opinion of every
one. I shall have a splendid chance to try, I know, and I know too
that the native hue of resolution has never been of very great
shade in me hitherto. I am sure that that feeling is a right one,
and I mean to live according to it if I can. If I do so I think I
shall turn out all right.
I stopped this letter before tea, when Wilky the rosy-gilled and
Frank Higginson came in. I now resume it by the light of a taper
and that of the moon. Wilky read H.'s letter and amused me "metch"
by his naive interpretation of Mother's most rational request that
I should "keep a memorandum of all moneys I receive from Father."
He thought it was that she might know exactly what sums her
prodigal philosopher really gives out, and that mistrust of his
generosity caused it. The phrase has a little sound that way, as H.
subtly framed it, I confess!
The first few days, the first week here, I really didn't know what
to do with myself or how to fill my time. I felt as if turned out
of doors. I then received H.'s and Mother's letters. Never before
did I know what mystic depths of rapture lay concealed within that
familiar word. Never did the same being look so like two different
ones as I going in and out of the P.O. if I bring a letter with me.
Gloomily, with despair written on my leaden brow I stalk the street
along towards the P.O., women, children and students involuntarily
shrinking against the wall as I pass--thus,[4] as if the curse of
Cain were stamped upon my front. But when I come out with a letter
an immense concourse of people generally attends me to my lodging,
attracted by my excited wild gestures and look.
Christmas being sparely kept in the New England of those days, William
passed that of 1861, as a Cambridge letter of the afternoon indicates,
without opportunity for a seasonable dash to Newport, but with such
compensations, nearer at hand as are here exhibited. Our brother Wilky,
I should premise, had been placed with the youngest of us, Bob, for
companion, at the "co-educational" school then but a short time
previously established by Mr. F. B. Sanborn at Concord,
Massachusetts--and of which there will be more to say. "Tom" Ward,
already mentioned and who, having left the Concord school shortly
before, had just entered Harvard, was quickly to become William's
intimate, approved and trusted friend; the diversion of whose patient
originality, whose intellectual independence, ability and curiosity from
science and free inquiry to hereditary banking--consequent on the
position of the paternal Samuel Gray Ward as the representative for many
years in the United States of the house of Baring Brothers--he from the
first much regretted: the more pertinently doubtless that this companion
was of a family "connected" with ours through an intermarriage, Gus
Barker, as Mrs. S. G. Ward's nephew, being Tom's first cousin as well as
ours, and such links still counting, in that age of comparatively
less developed ramifications, when sympathy and intercourse kept pace as
it was kept between our pairs of parents.
[Illustration: A leaf from the letter quoted on page 129.]
I have been in Boston the whole blest morning, toted round by the
Wards, who had as usual asked me to dine with them. I had happily
provided myself with an engagement here for all such emergencies,
but, as is my sportive wont, I befooled Tom with divers answers,
and finally let him believe I would come (having refused several
dazzling chances for the purpose) supposing of course I should see
him here yesterday at Miss Upham's board and disabuse him. But the
young viper went home right after breakfast--so I had to go into
Boston this morning and explain. Wilky had come up from Concord to
dine in said Commonwealth Avenue, and I, as it turned out, found
myself in for following the innocent lamb Lily up and down the town
for two hours, to hold bundles and ring bells for her; Wilky and
Tom having vanished from the scene. Clear sharp cold morning,
thermometer 5 degrees at sunrise, and the streets covered with one
glare of ice. I had thick smooth shoes and went sliding off like an
avalanche every three steps, while she, having india-rubbers and
being a Bostonian, went ahead like a swan. I had among other things
to keep her bundles from harm, to wipe away every three minutes the
trembling jewel with which the cold _would_ with persistent
kindness ornament my coral nose; to keep a hypocritic watchful eye
on her movements lest she fall; to raise my hat gracefully to more
and more of her acquaintances every block; to skate round and round
embracing lamp-posts and door-scrapers by the score to keep from
falling, as well as to avoid serving old lady-promenaders in the
same way; to cut capers 4 feet high at the rate of 20 a second,
every now and then, for the same purpose; to keep from scooting
off down hills and round corners as fast as my able-bodied
companion; often to do all these at once and then fall lickety-bang
like a chandelier, but _when_ so to preserve an expression of
placid beatitude or easy nonchalance despite the raging fiend
within: oh it beggars description! When finally it was over and I
stood alone I shook my companion's dust from my feet and, biting my
beard with rage, sware a mighty oath unto high heaven that I would
never, while reason held her throne in this distracted orb, _never_
NEVER, by word, look or gesture and this without mental
reservation, acknowledge a "young lady" as a human being. The false
and rotten spawn might die before I would wink to save it. No more
Parties now!--at last I am a Man, etc., etc.!
My enthusiasm ran very high for a few minutes, but I suddenly saw
that I was a great ass and became sobered instantly, so that on the
whole I am better for the circumstance, being a sadder and a wiser
man. I also went to the Tappans' and gave the children slight
presents; then, coming home to my venal board, behaved very
considerately and paternally to a young lady who sat next to me,
but with a shade of subdued melancholy in my manner which could not
have been noticed at the breakfast-table. Many times and bitterly
to-day have I thought of home and lamented that I should have to be
away at this merry Christmastide from my rare family; wondering,
with Wilky, if they were missing us as we miss them. And now as I
sit in the light of my kerosene, with the fire quietly consuming in
the grate and the twilight on the snow outside and the melancholy
old-fashioned strains of the piano dimly rising from below, I see
in vision those at home just going in to dinner; my aged, silvered
Mother leaning on the arm of her stalwart yet flexible H., merry
and garrulous as ever, my blushing Aunt with her old wild beauty
still hanging about her, my modest Father with his rippling raven
locks, the genial auld Rob and the mysterious Alice, all rise
before me, a glorified throng; but two other forms, one tall,
intellectual, swarthy, with curved nose and eagle eye, the other
having breadth rather than depth, but a goodly morsel too, are
wanting to complete the harmonious whole. Eftsoons they vanish and
I am again alone, _alone_--what pathos in the word! I have two
companions though, most all the time--remorse and despair! T. S.
Perry took their place for a little, and to-day they have not come
back. T. S. seemed to enjoy his visit very much. It was very
pleasant for me to have him; his rustic wonder at the commonest
sights was most ludicrous, and his conversation most amusing and
instructive.
The place here improves to me as I go on living in it, and if I
study with Agassiz 4 or 5 years there is nothing I should like
better than to have you all with me, regular and comfortable. I
enclose another advertisement of a house--but which would be too
small for us, I believe, though it might be looked at. I had a long
talk with one of A.'s students the other night, and saw for the
first time how a naturalist may feel about his trade exactly as an
artist does about his. For instance Agassiz would rather take
wholly uninstructed people--"for he has to unteach them all they
have learnt." He doesn't let them so much as look into a book for a
long while; what they learn they must learn for themselves and be
_masters_ of it all. The consequence is he makes Naturalists of
them--doesn't merely cram them; and this student (he had been there
2 years) said he felt ready to go anywhere in the world now with
nothing but his notebook and study out anything quite alone. A.
must be a great teacher. Chemistry comes on tolerably, but not so
fast as I expected. I am pretty slow with my substances, having
done but 12 since Thanksgiving and having 38 more to do before the
end of the term.
Comment on the abundance, the gaiety and drollery, the generous play of
vision and fancy in all this, would seem so needless as to be almost
officious, were not the commentator constantly, were he not infinitely,
arrested and reminded and solicited; which is at once his advantage and
his embarrassment. Such a letter, at all events, read over with the
general key, touches its contemporary scene and hour into an intensity
of life for him; making indeed the great sign of that life my brother's
signal vivacity and cordiality, his endless spontaneity of mind. Every
thing in it is characteristic of the genius and expressive of the mood,
and not least, of course, the pleasantry of paradox, the evocation of
each familiar image by its vivid opposite. Our mother, _e.g._, was not
at that time, nor for a good while yet, so venerably "silvered"; our
handsome-headed father had lost, occipitally, long before, all pretence
to raven locks, certainly to the effect of their "rippling"; the beauty
of our admirable aunt was as happily alien either to wildness or to the
"hanging" air as it could very well be; the "mystery" of our young
sister consisted all in the candour of her natural bloom, even if at the
same time of her lively intelligence; and H.'s mirth and garrulity
appear to have represented for the writer the veriest ironic translation
of something in that youth, I judge, not a little mildly--though oh _so_
mildly!--morose or anxiously mute. To the same tune the aquiline in his
own nose heroically derides the slightly relaxed line of that feature;
and our brother Wilky's want of physical "depth" is a glance at a
different proportion. Of a like tinge of pleasantry, I may add, is the
imputation of the provincial gape to our friend T. S. Perry, of Newport
birth and unintermitted breeding, with whom we were to live so much in
the years to come, and who was then on the eve of entering Harvard--his
face already uninterruptedly turned to that love of letters, that
practice of them by dauntless and inordinate, though never at all
vulgarly resonant, absorption which was to constitute in itself the most
disinterested of careers. I had myself felt him from the first an
exemplary, at once, and a discouraging friend; he had let himself loose
in the world of books, pressed and roamed through the most various
literatures and the most voluminous authors, with a stride that, as it
carried him beyond all view, left me dismayed and helpless at the edge
of the forest, where I listened wistfully but unemulously to the far-off
crash from within of his felled timber, the clearing of whole spaces or
periods shelf by shelf or great tree by tree. The brother-in-law of
John La Farge, he had for us further, with that reviving consciousness
of American annals which the War was at once so rudely and so
insidiously to quicken in us, the glamour of his straight descent from
the Commodores Perry of the Lake Erie in the war of 1812, respectively,
and of the portentous penetration of Japan just after the mid-century,
and his longer-drawn but equally direct and so clean and comfortable
affiliation to the great Benjamin Franklin: as these things at least
seemed to me under my habit (too musing and brooding certainly to have
made for light loquacity) of pressing every wind-borne particle of
personal history--once the persons were only other enough from
myself--into the service of what I would fain have called picture or,
less explicitly, less formulatedly, romance.
These, however, are but too fond insistences, and what mainly bears
pointing out is my brother's already restless reach forth to some new
subject of study. He had but lately addressed himself, not without
confidence, to such an investigation of Chemistry as he might become
conscious of a warrant for, yet the appeal of Agassiz's great authority,
so much in the air of the Cambridge of that time, found him at once
responsive; it opened up a world, the world of sentient life, in the
light of which Chemistry faded. He had not, however, for the moment
done with it; and what I at any rate find most to the point in the pages
before me is the charm of their so witnessing to the geniality and
harmony of our family life, exquisite as I look back on it and reflected
almost as much in any one passage taken at hazard as in any other. He
had apparently, at the date of the following, changed his lodging.
President Felton's death has been the great event of the week--two
funerals and I don't know how many prayers and sermons. To-day I
thought I would go to University chapel for the sake of variety and
hear Dr. Peabody's final word on him--and a very long and
lugubrious one it was. The prayer was a prolonged moan in which the
death (not in its consequences, but in itself) was treated as a
great calamity, and the whole eulogy was almost ridiculously
overcharged. What was most disagreeable throughout was the wailing
tones, not a bit that of simple pagan grief at the _loss_--which
would have been honest; but a whine consciously put on as from a
sense of duty, and a whine at nothing definite either, only a
purposeless clothing of all his words in tears. The whole style of
the performance was such that I have concluded to have nothing more
to do with funerals till they improve.
The walking here has been terrible with ice or slush these many
weeks, but over head celestial. No new developments in this house.
The maniac sometimes chills my very marrow by hoarsely whispering
outside the door, "Gulielmo, Gulielmo!" Old Sweetser sits in his
dressing-gown smoking his pipe all day in a little uncomfortable
old _bathroom_ next door to me. He may with truth be called a
queer cuss. The young ladies have that very nasty immodest habit of
hustling themselves out of sight precipitately whenever I appear. I
dined with Mrs. ---- yesterday all alone. She was quite sick, very
hoarse, and _he_ was in the country, so that on the whole it was a
great bore. She is very clumsy in her way of doing things, and her
invitation to me was for the wife of an artist--not artistic!
I am now studying organic Chemistry. It will probably shock Mother
to hear that I yesterday destroyed a pockethandkerchief--but it was
an old one and I converted it into some sugar which though rather
brown is very good. I believe I forgot to tell you that I am shorn
of my brightest ornament. That solitary hirsute jewel which lent
such a manly and martial aspect to my visage is gone, and the place
thereof is naked. I don't think anyone will know the difference,
and moreover it is not dead, it only sleeps and will some day rise
phoenix-like from its ashes with tenfold its former beauty. When
Father comes will he please bring Ganot's Physique _if H. doesn't
want it_?
In none of these earlier communications from Cambridge is the element of
affectionate pleasantry more at play than in those addressed to his
sister.
Charmante jeune fille, I find the Tappans _really_ expected me to
bring you to them and were much disappointed at my failure. Ellen
has grown very fat and big. Mary calls everybody "horrid." Lyly
Barker is with the Wards. I haven't seen her yet, but shall do so
on Saturday, when I am also to dine with the Hunts. I hope your
neuralgia, or whatever you may believe the thing was, has gone and
that you are back at school instead of languishing and lolling
about the house. I send you herewith a portrait of Prof. Eliot, a
very fair likeness, to grace your book withal. Write me whenever
you have the slightest or most fleeting inclination to do so. If
you have only one sentence to say, don't grudge paper and stamps
for it. You don't know how much good you may do me at an
appropriate time by a little easy scratching of your graceful
nimble pen.
In another apostrophe to the same correspondent, at the same season, his
high spirits throw off the bonds of the vernacular.
Est-ce que tu songes jamais a moi comme moi je songe a toi?--oh je
crois bien que non! Maintes fois dans la journee l'image d'une
espece d'ange vetue de blanc avec de longs boucles noirs qui
encadrent une figure telle que la plupart des mortels ne font que
l'entrevoir dans leur reves, s'impose a mes sens ravis; creature
longue et fluette qui se dispose a se coucher dans une petite
chambrette verte ou le gaz fait un grand jour. Eh, oua, oua, oua!
c'est a faire mourir de douleur. Mais je parie que tout de meme pas
une etincelle ne vibre pour moi dans les fibres de ton coeur
endurci. Helas, oublie de mes parents et de mes semblables, je ne
vois, ou que je regarde, qu'un abime de desespoir, un gouffre noir
et peuple de demons, qui tot ou tard va m'engloutir. Tu ne m'ecris
jamais sauf pour me soutirer des objets de luxe. La vaste mere me
deteste, il n'y a que le frere qui me reste attache, et lui par
esprit d'opposition plus que par autre chose. Eh mon Dieu, que
vais-je devenir? En tout cas je vais clore cette lettre, qui s'est
allongee malgre moi. Ton frere, James William.
Of the same bright complexion is this report, addressed to his parents,
of the change of lodging already noted.
The presence of the Tweedys has been most agreeable and has
contributed in no small degree to break the shock of removal to
these new rooms, which are not near so cosy as the old; especially
with the smoking of my stove, which went on all the first two days.
That has been stopped, however, and the only trouble is now to get
the fire alight at all. I have generally to start it 3 or 4 times,
and the removal of the material of each failure from the grate is a
fearful business. I have also to descend to the cellar myself to
get my coal, and my "hod," as Ma Sweetser, my land-lady, calls it,
not being very much bigger than a milk-pitcher, doesn't add to the
charm. The coal is apt to drop on the stairs, and I have to pick it
all up. At present the stove fills the room with a nephitic and
pestilential gas, so that I have to keep the window open. I went
last night with the Tweedys to the concert for which they came up,
and with them this morning to hear Wendell Phillips. This Sweetser
family is worthy of Dickens. It consists of a Mr. and Miss S., Mr.
S.'s three gushing girls, a parrot and a maniac. The maniac is very
obstreperous. Her husband left her boarding here 3 months ago and
went to Cuba. When she got mad he was written to, but has sent no
reply, and they are keeping her. For the Aunt's sake I keep my
drawer locked against her at night. Old Sweetser is a riddle I hope
to do justice to at some future time, but can't begin on now. His
sister shakes like an aspen whenever she is spoken to. Oh I forgot
the most important character of all, the black wench who "does" the
room. She is about 20 years old and wears short frocks, but talks
like Alice Robeson and has an antediluvian face about as large as
the top of a flour-barrel.
I can really keep my hand from nothing, of whatever connection, that
causes his intensity of animation and spontaneity of expression to
revive. On a Sunday evening early in 1862 he had
just returned from Milton, and, after removing from my person a
beetle, sit down to write you immediately. Ever since 10.30 this
A.M. the beetle s'est promene a l'envi sur ma peau. The first
feeling I had of his becoming attached to it made me jump so as to
scare an old lady opposite me in the car into fits. Finding him too
hard to crush I let him run, and at last got used to him though at
times he tickled me to excruciation. I ache in every limb and every
cranny of my mind from my visit.... They had the usual number of
stories, wonderful and not wonderful, to tell of their friends and
relatives (of Stephen somebody, _e.g._, who had a waggon weighing
several tons run over his chest without even bruising him, and so
on). They are very nice girls indeed all the same. I then went,
near by, to the Forbes's in a state of profuse perspiration, and
saw handsome Mrs. F. and her daughters, and a substitute for
Governor Andrew in the person of his wife; after which I returned
here, being driven back in the car, as I perceived on the front
platform, by our old familiar--familiar indeed!--friend William (I
mean our Irish ex-coachman) whom age doesn't seem to render more
veracious, as he told me several very big stories about himself:
how he smashed a car to pieces the other night, how he first gave
the alarm of the great fire, etc.
I went to the theatre the other night, and, asking a gentleman to
make room for me, found him to be Bob Temple, who had arrived in
Boston that day. He looks very well and talks in the most
extraordinary way you ever heard about Slavery and the wickedness
of human society, and is apparently very sincere. He sailed for
Europe on Wednesday. I exhorted him to stop over at Newport, but he
wouldn't. There was something quite peculiar about him--he seemed
greatly changed. I can tell you more at home, but wish I might have
seen more of him. I have been the last three nights running to hear
John Wilkes Booth, the "young American Roscius." Rant, rant, rant
of the most fearful kind. The worst parts most applauded, but with
any amount of fire and energy in the passionate parts, in some of
which he really becomes natural.... You don't know what a regular
Sevigne you have in Alice. I blush for my delinquencies toward her,
but bow my head with meek humility, contented to be her debtor all
my life and despairing of ever repaying her the value of her
letters. Mother and Aunt I pine to see, and the honest Jack Tar of
the family, the rough Bob, with his rude untutored ways!
Traps for remembrance I find set at every turn here, so that I have
either to dodge them or patiently to suffer catching. I try in vain for
instance merely to brush past the image of our kinsman Robert Temple the
younger, who made with his brother Will the eldest pair in that house of
cousins: he waylays, he persuades me too much, and to fail of the few
right words for him would be to leave a deep debt unrepaid--his fitful
hovering presence, repeatedly vivid and repeatedly obscured, so
considerably "counted" for us, pointing the sharpest moral, pointing
fifty morals, and adorning a perpetual tale. He was for years, first on
the nearer and then little by little on the further, the furthest,
horizon, quite the most emphasised of all our wastrels, the figure
bristling most with every irregular accent that we were to find
ourselves in any closeness of relation with. I held him for myself at
least, from far back, a pure gift of free-handed chance to the grateful
imagination, the utmost limit of whose complaint of it could be but for
the difficulty of rendering him the really proper tribute. I regarded
him truly, for a long time, as a possession of the mind, the human image
swung before us with most of the effect of strong and thick and
inimitable colour. If to be orphaned and free of range had affected my
young fancy as the happy, that is the romantic, lot, no member of the
whole cousinship, favoured in that sense as so many of them were,
enjoyed so, by my making out, the highest privilege of the case.
Nothing, I could afterwards easily see, had been less inevitable and of
a greater awkwardness of accident than his being, soon after the death
of his parents, shipped off from Albany, in pursuit of an education, to
an unheard-of school in a remote corner of Scotland; which fact it was,
however, that played for me exactly the bright part of preparing to show
with particular intensity what Europe again, with the opportunity so
given, was going to proceed to. It thus shone out when after the lapse
of several years he recurred to our more competent view that, quite
richly erratic creature as he might appear, and to whatever degree of
wonder and suspense, of amusement and amazement, he might wind us up,
the rich alien influence, full of special queernesses and mysteries in
this special connection, had complacently turned him out for us and had
ever so irretrievably and ineffaceably stamped him. He rose before us,
tall and goodlooking and easy, as a figure of an oddly _civilised_
perversity; his irreverent challenging humour, playing at once, without
mercy, over American aspects, seemed somehow not less cultivated than
profane--just which note in itself caused the plot beautifully to
thicken; for this was to distinguish and almost embellish him throughout
a long career in which he was to neglect no occasion, however frankly
forbidding, for graceless adventure, that he had the pure derisive, the
loose and mocking mind, yet initiated, educated, almost elegantly
impudent, in other words successfully impertinent, and which expressed
itself, in particular by the pen, with a literary lightness that we used
to find inimitable. He had dangled there, further off and nearer, as a
character, to my attention, in the sense in which "people in books" were
characters, and other people, roundabout us, were somehow not; so that I
fairly thought of him (though this more, doubtless, with the lapse of
time) very much as if we had owed him to Thackeray or Dickens, the
creators of superior life to whom we were at that time always owing
most, rather than to any set of circumstances by which we had in our own
persons felt served; that he was inimitable, inimitably droll,
inimitably wasted, wanton, impossible, or whatever else it might be,
making him thus one with the rounded and represented creature, shining
in the light of art, as distinguished from the vague handful of more or
less susceptible material that had in the common air to pass for a true
concretion. The promise of this had been, to my original vision, in
every wind-borne echo of him, however light; I doubtless put people
"into books" by very much the same turn of the hand with which I took
them out, but it had tinged itself with the finely free that, proceeding
in due course from his school at Fochabers to the University of Aberdeen
(each sound and syllable of this general far cry from Albany had in
itself an incoherence!) he had encountered while there the oddest of all
occasions to embrace the Romish faith. In the same way it ministered to
the vivid, even if baffled, view of him that he appeared then to have
retreated upon the impenetrable stronghold of Nairn, described by him as
a bleak little Scotch watering-place which yet sufficed to his cluster
of predicaments: whence he began to address to his bewildered pair of
Albany guardians and trustees the earlier of that series of incomparably
amusing letters, as we judged them, the arrival of almost any one of
which among us, out of the midst of indocilities at once more and more
horrific and more and more reported with a desperate drollery, was to
constitute an event so supremely beguiling that distressful meanings and
expensive remedies found themselves alike salved to consciousness by the
fact that such compositions could only be, for people of taste,
enjoyable. I think of this hapless kinsman throughout as blest with a
"form" that appealed to the finer fibres of appreciation; so that,
variously misadventurous as he was ever to continue, his genius for
expression again and again just saved him--saved him for bare life, left
in his hand a broken piece of the effective magic wand, never perhaps
waved with anything like that easy grace in an equally compromised
interest.
It was at any rate as if I had from the first collected and saved up the
echoes--or so at least it seems to me now: echoes of him as all
sarcastically and incorrigibly mutinous, somewhat later on, while in
nominal charge of a despairing _pasteur_ at Neuchatel--followed by the
intensified sense of him, after I scarce remember quite what interval,
on his appearing at Newport, where his sisters, as I have mentioned, had
been protectively gathered in, during the year, more or less, that
followed our own installation there. Then it was that we had the value
of his being interesting with less trouble taken to that end--in
proportion to the effect achieved--than perhaps ever served such a
cause; it would perhaps scarce even be too much to say that, as the only
trouble he seemed capable of was the trouble of quite positively
declining to interest on any terms, his essential Dickensism, as I have
called it, or his Thackerayan tint if preferred, his comedy-virtue in
fine, which he could neither disown nor, practically speaking, misapply,
was stronger even than his particular sardonic cynicism, strongly as
that was at last to flower. I won't in the least say he dazzled--that
was reserved for his so quite otherwise brilliant, his temporarily
triumphant, younger brother, at whom I have already glanced, who was on
no possible terms with him, and never could have been, so that the
difficulty of their relation glimmers upon me as probably half the good
reason for the original queer despatch of the elder to about the
remotest, the most separating, point in space at which "educational
advantages" could be conceived as awaiting him. I must have had no need
by that time to be dazzled, or even to be charmed, in order more or less
fondly, often indeed doubtless fearfully, to apprehend; what I
apprehended being that here was a creature quite amusedly and
perceptively, quite attentively and, after a fashion, profitably, living
without a single one of the elements of life (of the inward, I mean,
those one would most have missed if deprived of them) that I knew as
most conducive to animation. What could have roused more curiosity than
this, for the time at least, even if there hadn't been associated with
it such a fine redolence, as I then supposed it, of the rich and strange
places and things, as I supposed _them_, that had contributed to making
him over? He had come back made--unless one was already, and too
conveniently or complacently, to call it unmade: _that_ was the point
(and it certainly wasn't Albany that ever would have made him); he had
come back charged, to my vision, with prodigious "English" impressions
and awarenesses, each so thoroughly and easily assimilated that they
might have played their part as convictions and standards had he
pretended to anything that would in that degree have satisfied us. He
never spoke of his "faith," as that might have been the thing we could
have held him to; and he knew what not too gracelessly to speak of when
the sense of the American grotesque in general and the largely-viewed
"family" reducibility to the absurd in particular offered him such free
light pasture. He had the sign of grace that he ever perfectly
considered my father--so far as attitude, distinct from behaviour, went;
but most members of our kinship on that side still clung to this habit
of consideration even when, as was in certain cases but too visible,
they had parted with all sense of any other. I have preserved no happier
truth about my father than that the graceless whom, according to their
own fond term, he, and he alone of all of us, "understood," returned to
him as often and appealed to him as freely as those happier, though
indeed scarce less importunate, in their connection, who found
attraction and reason enough in their understanding _him_. My brother's
impression of this vessel of intimations that evening at the Boston
theatre, and of his "sincerity" and his seeming "greatly changed,"
doesn't at all events, I feel, fail in the least to fit into one of
those amplifications upon which my incurable trick of unwillingness
wholly to sacrifice any good value compromised by time tends to
precipitate me with a force that my reader can scarce fear for me more
than I fear it for myself. There was no "extraordinary way" in which our
incalculable kinsman _mightn't_ talk, and that William should have had
for the hour the benefit of his general truth is but a happy note in my
record. It was not always the case that one wished one "might have seen
more of him," but this was only because one had had on any contact the
sense of seeing so much. That produced consequences among which the
desire for more might even be uncannily numbered. John Wilkes Booth, of
the same evening, was of course President Lincoln's assassin-to-be, of
whose crudely extravagant performance of the hero of Schiller's Robbers
I recall my brother's imitative description--I never myself saw him; and
it simplifies his case, I think, for distracted history, that he must
have been quite an abominable actor. I appear meanwhile to have paid
William at Cambridge a visit of which I have quite oddly lost
remembrance--by reason doubtless of its but losing itself in like,
though more prolonged, occasions that were to follow at no great
distance and that await my further reference. The manner of his own
allusion to it more than suffices.
The radiance of H.'s visit has not faded yet, and I come upon
gleams of it three or four times a day in my farings to and fro,
but it has never a bit diminished the lustre of far-off shining
Newport, all silver and blue, and of this heavenly group
below[5]--all being more or less failures, especially the two
outside ones. The more so as the above-mentioned H. could in no
wise satisfy my craving for knowledge of family and friends--he
didn't seem to have been on speaking terms with anyone for some
time past, and could tell me nothing of what they did, said or
thought, about any given subject. Never did I see a so-much
uninterested creature in the affairs of those about him. He is a
good soul, though, in his way, too; and less fatal than the light
fantastic and ever-sociable Wilky, who has wrought little but
disaster during his stay with me; breaking down my good resolutions
about food, keeping me from all intellectual exercise, working
havoc on my best hat by wearing it while dressing, while in his
nightgown, while washing his face, and all but going to bed with
it. He occupied my comfortable arm-chair all the morning in the
position represented in the fine plate that accompanies this
letter--but one more night though, and he will have gone, and no
thorn shall pierce the side of the serene and hallowed felicity of
expectation in which I shall revel till the time comes for
returning home, home to the hearth of my infancy and budding youth.
As Wilky has submitted to you a resume of his future history for
the next few years, so will I of mine, hoping it will meet your
approval. Thus: one year Chemistry, then one term at home. Then one
year with Wyman, followed by a medical education. Then five or six
years with Agassiz; after which probably death, death, death from
inflation and plethora of knowledge. This you had better seriously
consider. So farewell till 8.45 some Sunday evening soon. Your
bold, your beautiful, your blossom!
"I lead, as ever," he meanwhile elsewhere records, "the monotonous life
of the scholar, with few variations."
We have very general talk at our table, Miss Upham declaiming
against the vulgarity of President Lincoln and complacently telling
of her own ignorance as to the way the wind blows or as to the
political events going on, and saying she thinks it a great waste
of time and of "no practical account" to study natural history. F.
J. Child impresses one as very witty and funny, but leaves it
impossible to remember what he says. I took a walk with the
Divinity student this splendid afternoon. He told me he had been
walking yesterday with one of the Jerseymen and they had discussed
the doctrine of a future state. The Jerseyman thought that if the
easy Unitarian doctrines were to become popular the morals of the
community would be most terribly relaxed. "Why," said the other,
"here you are in the very thick of Unitarianism; look about
you--people are about as good as anywhere." "Yes," replied the
Jerseyman, "I confess to you that that is what has _staggered_ me,
and I don't understand it yet!"
I stretch over to the next year, 1863, for the sake of the following to
his sister.
Cherie charmante, I am established in a cosy little room, with a
large recess with a window in it containing bed and washstand, and
separated from the main apartment by a rich green silk curtain and
a large gilt cornice. This gives the whole establishment a splendid
look. I found when I got back here that Miss Upham had raised her
price; so great efforts were made by two of us to form a club. But
too little enthusiasm was shown by any one else, and it fell
through. I then with that fine economical instinct which
distinguishes me resolved to take breakfast and tea, of my own
finding and making, in my room, and only pay Miss Upham for
dinners. Miss U. is now holding forth at Swampscott, so I asked to
see her sister Mrs. Wood and learn the cost of the 7 dinners a
week. She with true motherly instinct said that I should only make
a slop with my self-made meals in my room, and that she would
rather let me keep on for 4.50, seeing it was me. I said she must
first consult Miss Upham. She returned from Swampscott saying that
Miss U. had sworn she would rather pay _me_ a dollar a week than
have me go away. Ablaze with economic passion I cried
"Done!"--trying to make it appear that she had made me a formal
offer to that effect. But she then wouldn't admit it, and after
much recrimination we separated, it being agreed that I should come
for 4.50, _but tell no one_. So mind _you_ don't either. I now lay
my hand on my heart and confidently look to my Mother for that
glance of approbation which she must bestow. Have I not redeemed
any weaknesses of the past? Though part of my conception fails, yet
it was boldly planned and would have been a noble stroke.
I have been pretty busy this week. I have a filial feeling toward
Wyman already. I work in a vast museum at a table all alone,
surrounded by skeletons of mastodons, crocodiles and the like, with
the walls hung about with monsters and horrors enough to freeze the
blood. But I have no fear, as most of them are tightly bottled up.
Occasionally solemn men and women come in to see the museum, and
sometimes timid little girls (reminding me of thee, my love, only
they are less fashionably dressed), who whisper "Is folks allowed
here?" It pains me to remark, however, that not all the little
girls are of this pleasing type, many being bold-faced jades.
Salter is back here, but morose. One or two new students and Prof.
Goodwin, who is very agreeable. Also William Everett, son of the
great Edward, very intelligent and a capital scholar, studying law.
He took honours at the English Cambridge. I send a photograph of
General Sickles for your and Wilky's amusement. It is a part of a
great anthropomorphological collection which I am going to make. So
take care of it, as well as of all the photographs you will find in
the table-drawer in my room. But isn't he a bully boy? Desecrate
the room as little as possible. If Wilky wants me as an extra nurse
send for me without hesitation.