being deceived. Though her jealousies and fears were troublesome, I
think they were useful. Sometimes she had light and comfort; oftener
otherwise. In her twentieth year she had a fever, and from the first she
thought she should not live, complained of her stupidity of mind,
impenitence and unbelief. I came home from afternoon exercise, found her
so ill that her mother thought herself obliged to tell her, upon which
she thanked her for her kindness, but quickly fell into great distress
on being unprepared for eternity. It would break a heart of stone to
hear her: 'Oh! dear sir, what shall I do?' ... Oh! the horrors of that
night. It was one of the most distressing I ever knew. She wouldn't
close her eyes for fear of dying. In the morning was a little more
resigned, fell asleep, awoke refreshed, but still in darkness. 'Oh! dear
father,' she would say, 'I have dreadfully apostatized from Christ.' Mr.
Sewall and I labored with her for days, but we found nobody but the
Almighty could do it.
"Dr. Sewall said, 'If she died in darkness, we should have good ground
to hope that she would awake in glory.' To everything he would say she
would reply, 'I cannot believe.' You must be sensible of a distressed
father's heart, putting his soul in her soul's place for many weeks.
"Incessant prayers were offered for her in public and private, by
relations and friends who loved her, but until the last half hour of her
life were unanswered. She was in agonies of death all the while Mr.
Sewall was praying. When he and the physician left, I told her they
could do nothing more. She was calm and composed, but did not speak....
It was so dismal to see her depart in darkness. Oh! the distress in that
room. I held her in my arms, she opened her eyes and spoke a new
language: 'Oh! I love the Lord with all my heart. I see such an
amiableness in him, I prize him above a thousand worlds.' I said, 'Dear
child, what have you to say to me?'--'Oh! sir, that you may be more
fervent in your ministry, in exhorting and expostulating with sinners.'
I never saw such a change in a sick room, from distress to joy when I
reported her words. I could scarcely have thought a father, mother,
brother and sister could have been so transported in the expiring
moments of one so dear to them."
This discourse was published in Edinboro' after his death. His daughter
Sarah, afterwards wife of Lieut.-Gov. Gill, survived her parents a few
years, but died, without children in 1771. She was also deeply
religious, and some of her writings were published in Edinboro' after
her death.
Mr. Prince's life, aside from his domestic afflictions, seems to have
flowed on in peaceful paths, that ran their quiet course between the
hardships of the early years of the colonies and the rising passions and
frequent strifes that reigned, particularly in New England, for years
before the Revolutionary war. His whole nature, tuned to harmony and
peaceful avocations, developed in its proper channel. The comparative
quiet of the first half of the eighteenth century permitted a thorough
devotion to his allotted pursuits. His forty years' pastorate in Boston
left their trace of love and good-will in seed which can never be
destroyed, and his indefatigable industry and painstaking perseverance
are lessons that could be of benefit to all generations.
He inherited a large property from his father. Beside other lands,
acquired and inherited, he owned the tract which is covered by the town
of Princeton, including Wachusett mountain, the town deriving its name
from him. In the Boylston Mansion at Princeton, there is a beautiful
crayon portrait of Mrs. Sarah Gill, his daughter, executed by Copley.
There is also a fine tall clock, which belonged to Mr. Prince, in the
possession of Mrs. Addison Denny, at Leicester. Mr. Prince brought it
with him from England in 1717; the whole case is in raised Japanese
work, and the face decorations very elaborate. It was made by Thomas
Wagstaffe, of London, and his descendants still make clocks at the same
shop, by hand and under the same name.
Mr. Prince died in 1757, after a year's illness, at seventy-two years of
age. The _Weekly Gazette_ said, in announcing his death: "His
performances in pulpit evidence a vast compass of thought, a sublime
imagination, a great faith and zeal. In printed composures there is a
fertility of invention, correctness of sentiment, sprightliness of
expression, that must delight every reader, and transmit his name to
posterity in the most advantageous light. His private life was amiable
and exemplary, adorned with grace and virtues. A useful member of civil
society. His consort has lost an affectionate husband; his only
surviving daughter, a tender father; his servants, an indulgent master;
his acquaintances, a kind, condescending friend; his church, an
enlightened and vigilant pastor; his country, a zealous advocate of
civil and religious liberty. Took farewell to this world with humble
resignation to the will of God, and entire dependence on our Lord Jesus
Christ, and a good hope of Immortality."
NEW ENGLAND MANNERS AND CUSTOMS IN THE TIME OF BRYANT'S EARLY LIFE.
BY MRS. H. G. ROWE.
Ninety-one years ago, in the little town of Cummington, Mass., was born
a child, who was destined, in after years, to be the first of a grand
line of American poets, who have made this, the second century of our
Republic, famous by their genius and originality.
Not long since, in looking over an old magazine, published in
Philadelphia in 1809, I came across quite an extended review of
Campbell's, then just issued, poem, "Gertrude of Wyoming," and was
not a little amused at the closing comments.
After a little mild praise, and a good deal of equally mild criticism,
of the Scotch poet, the editor goes on to say:--
"But, after all, although lesser poets are constantly rising above the
literary horizon, challenging the admiration of the reading world for a
few short months,--possibly years,--and then sinking into the obscurity
of a forgotten past, the sun of English poetry has set forever. With
Pope, Milton, and Dryden, England lost her last true poets. Henceforth
all who claim that title must be more or less skilful _imitators_ merely
of the great masters who have gone before them.
"As for America," he continues, with the most unpatriotic candor, "there
is not the smallest chance of her ever producing a real poet. Ingenious
scribblers she may have, without doubt, but the typical American never
had or will have one grain of poetry in his hard, shrewd, matter-of-fact
nature."
This was the verdict of a Philadelphia editor seventy-six years ago.
To-day the bust of our own Longfellow stands in Westminster Abbey, side
by side with a Chaucer and a Shakspere, while not only the
English-speaking world on both sides of the ocean, but the dwellers in
sunny Italy, upon the frozen steppes of Russia, and in far-off Japan and
India, sing and repeat, each in his own tongue, the stirring
battle-hymns and sweet home-songs of the gifted singers of our Western
World.
We are often reminded that a writer's environments have much to do with
the character of his writings, and in Bryant's case this fact is
particularly noticeable.
His earliest poems, and especially that great masterpiece,
"Thanatopsis," written at the early age of eighteen, show unmistakably
that the boy had grown up in the closest familiarity with the
theological tenets of the New England of his day, and that the bent of
his young mind was, even then, toward graver subjects than would
naturally occupy the thoughts of a boy of that age.
His biographers assert that he drew his inspiration for this grand poem
from the pages of Kirke White and Southey. But whatever his acquaintance
with these poets may have done for him, there is a striking similarity
of imagery and sentiment between his own and the writings of the sacred
bards, whose utterances were as familiar to the children of a Christian
household in those days as their own childish nursery songs and hymns.
For instance, compare these lines from "Thanatopsis" with a well-known
passage in the Book of Job:--
"... Yet the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep,--the dead reign there alone."
The sacred poet says:--
"Yet shall he be brought to the grave, and shall remain in the tomb.
The clods of the valley shall be sweet unto him, and every man shall draw
after him as there are innumerable before him."
Then, again, in "The Old Man's Funeral":--
"Then rose another hoary man, and said,
In faltering accents, to that weeping train:
'Why mourn ye that our aged friend is dead?
Ye are not sad to see the gathered grain.'"
Compare this with:
"Thou shall come to the grave in a full age, like as a shock of corn
cometh in his season."
Examples similar to these occur in many of Bryant's poems, and tend to
show the result of the early religious training, that, as the son of a
thoughtful, God-fearing New England gentleman of that day, he most
certainly did receive.
That he was intensely, grandly, sometimes fiercely patriotic, is also
due, in a great measure, to the surrounding influences of his young
life.
The struggle for American independence was at last over, and the lusty
young Republic, springing, Minerva-like, from the mighty brain of a no
longer imperilled freedom, was ready to throw down the gauntlet of
defiance to all the world, and assert her rights as queen regnant of the
great Western World.
The armies had been disbanded, and the war-scarred veterans had joyfully
returned to their farms and workshops, ready to put their willing hands
again to the plough and the plane, and help to restore, by patient toil
and honest legislation, prosperity and peace to the land so long
distracted by the commotions and uncertainties of war.
Later, his days of toil over, the old soldier sat him down, in restful
content, by his own peaceful fireside, while, with the old musket in its
honored place above the tall wooden mantle, he fought over again, in
memory, his old-time battles, and to sons and grandsons taught, in
thrilling, patriotic words, the great lesson to love and revere their
country next to their God.
As a boy, no doubt, young Bryant had listened to many of the tales of
these honored veterans, and had drank in, with the air of his own native
village, long draughts of their fervid patriotism, that animated his
writings down to the latest years of his life.
That he had seen with his own eyes some of the leading spirits in that
great national struggle, who still lived to honor and be honored by the
nation that they had fought so bravely to free from a foreign yoke, is
shown by an extract from one of his few humorous poems, in which he
says:--
"I pause to state
That I, too, have seen greatness--even I--
Shook hands with Adams, stared at Lafayette,
When, barehead, in the hot noon of July,
He would not let the umbrella be held o'er him,
For which three cheers burst from the mob before him."
Patriotic, religious, philosophical, and a true lover of nature, yet
Bryant cannot, in any mood, be styled one of our fireside poets, like
Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell.
Perhaps he failed to see in the then bare loneliness of the typical
New England home a beauty worth the attention of his fastidious and
lofty-minded muse. And that New England homes, at that time, were bare
of what we, to-day, deem the absolute necessities of life, no student of
the past pretends to deny.
The long war had drained and impoverished the country; our manufactures
and commerce were then in their infancy; the whole machinery of our
recently organized government was new, and the hands that worked it,
however wise and brave they might be, were untried, and had much to
learn before the ponderous works could be brought into perfect running
order.
Worst of all, President Jefferson, in 1807, laid an embargo upon
American shipping, thus unwittingly striking a terrible blow at our
foreign commerce, in his endeavor to force England into an amicable
settlement of certain difficulties that had arisen between her and the
young Republic. This, and the two years' war with England, that broke
out in 1812, made hard times for everybody, and taxed the magnanimity
and skill of our foremothers to their utmost to make their homes and
families present a decent and respectable appearance.
The very poor then, as now, were forced to content themselves with the
barest decencies of life. But the respectable middle classes,--the
farmers, mechanics, and small merchants,--were put to the greatest
straits to keep up an appearance of respectability and comfort, with
scant conveniences, and few or none of even the simplest elegancies of
life, in dwelling, dress, or furniture.
The principal room of a New England farm-house was the kitchen, which
was usually large enough to serve for a cooking, dining, and sitting
room, all in one.
The enormous fireplace, with its long, soot-blackened crane, hung with
hooks of various sizes, the massive iron andirons, strong enough to hold
the great birch and birchen logs, that often taxed the strength of a
full-grown man to lift and adjust in their places, occupied a large part
of one side of the room, and served as a kind of family altar, about
which the family, with their guests and friends, always assembled, in
quiet chat or friendly gossip.
And a cheery spot it was, especially in those long, dark evenings in
midwinter, when the ruddy, dancing flames went laughing up the great
throat of the chimney, chasing the venturesome, wayward sparks, as they
hurried out into the untried darkness of the winter's night. With what a
genial glow they lighted up the bare, unplastered walls, the sanded
floor, the rough rafters overhead, and the scant, clumsily-fashioned
furniture, until
"The rude, bare-raftered room
Burst, flower-like, into rosy bloom."
Nor must we forget that seldom wanting, always interesting, piece of
furniture, to which was sure to be accorded the warmest, coziest spot in
the wide chimney-corner,--the inevitable wooden cradle,--clumsily
fashioned by loving, but unskilled hands, and always large enough to
hold, besides the reigning baby, two, and, at a pinch, three, of the
younger members of the household.
How the favored youngsters delighted in a ride in that clumsy old
vehicle, nor dreamed that its halting, uncertain gait was other than the
very poetry of motion! Even mother's own wooden rocking-chair, a bit of
boughten elegance, with its gay patchwork cushion, and dull, contented
"creak! creak!" as its dear occupant swayed meditatively to and fro,
knitting in hand, in the quiet, restful gloaming, was not quite equal to
that dear, delightful old cradle, for a good brisk canter to "Banbury
Cross," or to the famous hunting grounds, where "Baby Bunting's rabbit
skin" was waiting for him.
Many a man, and woman too, whose names are, to-day, blessed and honored
by thousands of grateful hearts all over the land, dreamed then their
first misty, childish dreams of a grand and helpful manhood and
womanhood, and felt swelling up within their young souls inexpressible
longings to help right the wrongs of the down-trodden and oppressed,
which they heard their elders talk of, and deplore as past remedy.
The light of other days was simply a home-made tallow candle, and as
matches were not then invented, careful housewives never suffered the
kitchen-fire, even in the hottest days of summer, to die out entirely.
The frequent sight of a child running to the nearest neighbor's, with a
long-handled iron fire-shovel in hand, to "borry a few coals ter start
the fire up," was looked upon as a sure sign of slack housewifery; and
no woman might lay claim to the distinction of a good housekeeper who
failed to renew her cedar broom as often as every other week.
Equal simplicity in dress prevailed, and a gown of bombazette--a very
narrow, all-wool goods, worth from seventy-five cents to a dollar a
yard,--was often worn for best during the owner's lifetime, and at her
death bequeathed, with the fondly-cherished string of gold beads, to the
favorite granddaughter, as a precious legacy.
For common wear, pressed home-made and home-dyed flannel in winter; and
cotton and linen, woven in colored stripes or plaids, for summer, was
considered plenty good enough, even for the doctor's and minister's
wives. Under flannels were an unheard-of luxury. And one ceases to
wonder at the frequency of hereditary consumption, in our own day, when
he reads that fashionable city ladies, in the very depths of a Northern
winter, walked the icy streets in thin cotton or silk stockings and low,
pointed, high-heeled morocco shoes. Rubbers being then unknown, and the
shoes of stout calf-skin, that their country cousins were only too glad
to get, were disdained by these dainty dames as coarse and unlady-like.
A girl carded, spun, wove, bleached, and made her one white linen gown,
lavishing upon it all her simple art of needlecraft, every seam and hem
stitched by the old-time rule, "take up one thread and skip two," and,
perhaps, embroidering a pattern of tiny sprays and eyelets upon the
bosom and sleeves, to give it an air of special gentility.
Finished at last, this choice bit of girlish finery probably served its
owner for a wedding-dress, and afterwards was cut up into slips for the
babies.
Matrons, young as well as old, wore caps of plain white muslin, made
after the same fashion as the round, sweeping caps that tidy
housekeepers wear at the present day. The younger and gayer ones, who
had no scruples of conscience on the subject, wore their caps adorned
with bright ribbons, while the elderly and more sedate contented
themselves with a plain band of black, across the front, and pinned
primly at the back, without bow or knot.
After the death of Washington, in 1799, besides the band of crape that
every citizen of the United States, by the desire of Congress, wore upon
his left arm for thirty days, many of the loyal matrons provided
themselves with mourning-cap ribbons, upon which was stamped, in white
letters, upon a black ground:
"General George Washington,
Departed this life on the 14th of December,
1799, AE. 68,"
--a fac-simile of the inscription upon the coffin-plate of that
illustrious and well-beloved chief. The wool and flax were home
productions, but the cotton was brought, in a raw state, from the West
Indies.
It was first picked over very carefully, to remove the seeds and stray
bits of foreign rubbish, then "batted," that is, made into small pats,
each large enough to be carded into a roll, which was spun into thread
upon either a wool or linnen wheel. This "batting" usually fell to the
lot of the children of the family, who probably found the monotonous
task as little to their taste as their grandchildren do, when required
to wash the dishes or saw wood for the cooking-stove.
Woven plain, by the skilful hands of the housemother, and bleached upon
the young grass under the blossoming apple boughs, the cloth served for
the underwear of the family, and was regarded as one of the few luxuries
of the frugal household,--the raw cotton costing over fifty cents a
pound, to say nothing of the time and labor required to convert it into
cloth.
On account of the scarcity of cotton, our modern "comfortables" were a
thing unheard of, and, for a substitute, woollen quilts, stuffed with
wool, and closely quilted, often in the most elaborate patterns, were
used in all New England households. These quilts were often few and thin
in many a poor home, where the elders had hard work to shield their
flock of little ones from the bitter cold of winter, in spite of the
immense fires that even the poorest were able to provide where any
amount of fuel could be had for the cutting.
I have heard a story of a good lady who lived at that time in a town not
a hundred miles from Boston, which gives one some idea of the straits to
which our grandparents were often reduced in those days:--
Watching one bitterly cold night with a sick neighbor, she heard, at
midnight, the little children crying with cold in the loft overhead, and
leaving her sleeping patient, she went upstairs, and tried to find an
extra quilt or blanket to spread over them. But in vain, for in that
poor home there was not so much as a shoulder-blanket that could be
spared. At last, in utter desperation, she spread over the shivering
little ones a _side of leather_, that she found rolled up under the
eaves.
"It kept out the cold, anyhow," she said, as she told the story years
afterwards. "And the poor little things stopped their cryin', and
cuddled down as contented an' comfortable as a nestful o' kittens."
If there was little of poetry or romance in the lives of those
hard-working, hard farming men and women of a past generation, there was
no lack of the patient diligence and simple, unquestioning faith, that
give strength to weakness, and sweeten toil with the steadfast belief
that, to the faithful heart and willing hand God's blessing never fails.
One of the favorite proverbs at that time is significant, as proverbs
usually are, of the character of the people:--
"Begin your web, and God will supply you with thread."
While still another suggests that well-known element in the New England
character that the Scotch aptly call "canny":--
"A wise man will bend a little rather than be torn up by the roots."
Extravagance was more than a fault, it was an actual sin, in the eyes of
these prudent, simple-living folk, and you may have heard before the
story of the ingenious housewife, who, tired of the blank bareness of
her yellow-painted floors, conceived the bold idea of manufacturing a
carpet for it herself:
A large square of sail-cloth served her for a canvas, and upon this she
painted, with the few colors that she could procure, a pattern of
flowers of every kind that she was familiar with,--blue roses and green
lilies having the preference, as making more show than their humbler
sisters. This, when finished, she covered with a thick coat of varnish,
thus making a very good substitute for the more modern oil-cloth.
Of course everybody, from far and near, came to look, and wonder, and
admire; and among them a good old deacon, who, after critically
surveying the wonderful work, turned to the proud artist, and, with a
look half of amazement, half of pitying reproach, upon his honest,
weather-beaten face, asked solemnly:--
"Sister ----, do you expect to have _all this_ and _heaven_ too?"
To-day, Boston is sometimes jestingly styled the "Hub of the Universe,"
but at the beginning of the present century it was, soberly speaking,
the Hub of New England, for from it spokes projected into every part,
however distant, of that region.
As in past ages all roads led to Rome, so seventy-five or eighty years
ago all roads led to or from Boston. In an old Farmer's Almanac, printed
in 1817, I find, among other things quaint and curious, four
closely-printed pages devoted to "Roads to the Principal Towns of the
Continent from Boston, with the distances and names of Innkeepers."
Beginning with: "From Boston to Newport, over Seekonk, through Rehoboth,
69 miles," and ending with "Down the Ohio, to the mouth of the
Muskinqum, 524 miles,"--a tolerably long ride in those days of the
old-fashioned stage coach.
Naturally, this Umbilicus of the Western World set the fashions in
theology, literature, dress, and manners for all New England, and any
one who had made a trip to Boston was venerated as a kind of travelled
wonder, and forever after regarded as an authority upon all mooted
points of general interest.
It has been said, on what authority I am unable to state, that "all good
Americans go to Paris when they die." But in those days of Boston's
supremacy an aspiring dame in one of our Maine villages, finding herself
upon her death bed, expressed as her one last wish, that she "might be
permitted to go to heaven by the way o' Boston."
Evidently the poor soul had pined in vain all her life for a sight of
its splendors, and could think of nothing so near akin to heaven as a
peep at this earthly Paradise on her way there.
I might go on indefinitely to call up pictures, heroic, quaint, or
pathetic, of these earnest-hearted men and women, who toiled, suffered,
and planned, for the future, that we, their children, have entered into
the fulness of. But time forbids, and I can only say, in closing this
paper, that it will be well for us, if, in these days of national
prosperity and power, when Liberty, proudly triumphant, stands like