"THE CORNER"
1835-1839; _aet._ 16-20
But well I thank my father's sober house
Where shallow judgment had no leave to be,
And hurrying years, that, stripping much beside,
Turned as they fled, and left me charity.
J. W. H.
The house which Mr. Ward built on the corner of Bond Street and Broadway
was still standing in the middle of the nineteenth century; a dignified
mansion of brick, with columns and trimmings of white marble.
In her "Reminiscences," our mother recalls the spacious rooms, hung with
red, blue, and yellow silk. The yellow drawing-room was reserved for
high occasions, and for "Miss Ward's" desk and grand piano. This and the
blue room were adorned by fine sculptured mantelpieces, the work of a
young sculptor named Thomas Crawford, who was just coming into notice.
Behind the main house, stretching along Broadway, was the picture
gallery, the first private one in New York, and Mr. Ward's special
pride. The children might not mingle in frivolous gayety abroad, but
they should have all that love, taste, and money could give them at
home; he filled his gallery with the best pictures he could find. A
friend (Mr. Prescott Hall), making a timely journey through Spain,
bought for him many valuable pictures, among them a Snyders, a Nicolas
Poussin, a reputed Velasquez and Rembrandt. It was for him that Thomas
Cole painted the four pictures representing "The Voyage of Life,"
engravings from which may still be found in old-fashioned parlors.
Some years later, when the eldest son, Samuel, returned from Europe,
bringing with him a fine collection of books, Mr. Ward built a library
specially for them.
This was the house into which the family moved in 1835, Julia being then
sixteen years of age; this was the house she loved, the memory of which
was dear to her through all the years of her life.
The family was at that time patriarchal in its dimensions: Mr. Ward and
his six children, Dr. and Mrs. Francis and their four; often, too,
"Grandma Cutler" and other Cutlers, not to speak of Wards, Greenes, and
McAllisters. (Louisa, youngest of the Cutler sisters, one of the most
beautiful and enchanting women of her time, was married to Matthew Hall
McAllister.) One and all were sure of a welcome at "The Corner"; one and
all were received with cordial urbanity, first by Johnson, the colored
butler, later by Mr. Ward, the soul of dignified hospitality.
Another inmate of the house during several years was Christy
Evangelides, a Greek boy, orphaned in a Turkish massacre. Mr. Ward took
the boy into his family, gave him his education and a start in life.
Fifty years later Mr. Evangelides recalled those days in a letter to his
"sister Julia," and paid beautiful tribute to his benefactor.
To all these should be added a host of servants and retainers; and
masters of various kinds, coming to teach music, languages, even
dancing, for the children were taught to dance even if they never (or
very seldom) were allowed to go to dances. Many of these teachers were
foreign patriots: those were the days when one French _émigré_ of rank
dressed the hair of fashionable New York, while another made its salads,
the two going their rounds before every festivity.
Julia's musical education began early. Her first teacher was a French
artist, so irritable that the terrified child could remember little that
he taught her. He was succeeded in her tenth year by Mr. Boocock, a
pupil of Cramer, to whom she always felt that she owed a great deal. Not
only did he train her fingers so carefully that after eighty years they
still retained their flexibility, but he also trained and developed her
inborn taste for all that was best in music.
As she grew toward girlhood, the good master found that her voice
promised to be a remarkable one, and recommended to her father Signor
Cardini, formerly an intimate of the Garcia family, and thoroughly
versed in the famous Garcia method. Under his care Julia's voice
developed into a pure, clear mezzo-soprano, of uncommon range and
exquisite quality. She felt all through her life the benefit of those
early lessons.
When she was eighty years old she attended a meeting of the National
Peace Society at Park Street Church, Boston. The church was packed with
people. When her turn came to speak, the kindly chairman said:--
"Ladies and Gentlemen, we are now to have the great pleasure of
listening to Mrs. Howe. I am going to ask you all to be very quiet, for
though Mrs. Howe's voice is as sweet as ever, it is perhaps not quite so
strong."
"_But it carries!_" said the pupil of old Cardini. The silver tone,
though not loud, reached the farthest corner of the great building; the
house "came down" in a thunder of applause. It was a beautiful moment
for the proud daughter who sat beside her.
Music was one of the passions of her life. Indeed, she felt that it had
sometimes influenced her even too much, and in recording the delight she
took in the trios and quartets which Mr. Boocock arranged for her, she
adds: "The reaction from this pleasure, however, was very painful, and
induced at times a visitation of morbid melancholy, which threatened to
upset my health."
She felt that "in the training of young persons, some regard should be
had to the sensitiveness of youthful nerves, and to the overpowering
response which they often make to the appeals of music....
"The power and sweep of great orchestral performances, or even the
suggestive charm of some beautiful voice, will sometimes so disturb the
mental equilibrium of the hearer as to induce in him a listless
melancholy, or, worse still, an unreasoning and unreasonable
discontent."[10]
[10] _Reminiscences_, p. 43.
In a later chapter of her "Reminiscences," she says: "I left school at
the age of sixteen, and began thereafter to study in good earnest.
Until that time a certain over-romantic and imaginative turn of mind had
interfered much with the progress of my studies. I indulged in
day-dreams which appeared to me far higher in tone than the humdrum of
my school recitations. When these were at an end, I began to feel the
necessity of more strenuous application, and at once arranged for myself
hours of study, relieved by the practice of vocal and instrumental
music."
These hours of study were not all passed at home. In 1836 she was taking
certain courses at the boarding and day school of Mrs. E. Smith, then in
Fifth Avenue, "first house from Washington Square."
The Italian master was a son of the venerable Lorenzo da Ponte, who in
his youth had written for Mozart the librettos of "Don Giovanni" and "Le
Nozze di Figaro."
Four languages, English, French, German, and Italian, Julia learned
thoroughly; she spoke and wrote them throughout her life correctly as
well as fluently, with singularly pure accent and inflection, and seldom
or never was at a loss for a word; nor was she less proficient in
history. For mathematics she had no gift, and was wont to say that her
knowledge of the science was limited to the fact that four quarts made a
gallon: yet the higher mathematics had a mysterious attraction for her,
as an unexplored region of wonder and romance.
She was always a student. When she began the study of German, she set
herself a task each day; lest anything should interfere to distract her
mind, she had herself securely tied to her armchair, giving orders that
she was on no account to be set free before the appointed hour.
This was characteristic of her through life. The chain of habit once
formed was never broken, and study was meat and drink to her. Her
"precious time" (which we children saucily abbreviated to "P.T.") was as
real a thing to us as sunrise: we were not to break in upon it for
anything short of a fire--or a cut finger!
Many years later, she laid down for the benefit of the younger
generation these rules:--
"If you have at your command three hours _per diem_, you may study art,
literature, and philosophy, not as they are studied professionally, but
in the degree involved in general culture.
"If you have but one hour every day, read philosophy, or learn foreign
languages, living or dead.
"If you can command only fifteen or twenty minutes, read the Bible with
the best commentaries, and daily a verse or two of the best poetry."
In the days when Julia was going round the corner to Mrs. Smith's
school, Sam was newly returned from a long course of study and travel
abroad, while Henry and Marion were at Round Hill School under the care
of Dr. Joseph Greene Cogswell and Mr. George Bancroft. The former was a
beloved friend of the Ward family, and often visited them. We have
pleasant glimpses of the household at this time, when the lines of
paternal guidance, though still firmly, were somewhat less rigidly
drawn.
Breakfast at "The Corner" was at eight in winter, and at half past seven
in summer, Mr. Ward reading prayers before the meal, and again at
bedtime. He would often wake his daughters in the morning by pelting
them with stockings, crying, "Come, my rosebuds!"
The young people were apt to linger over the breakfast table in talk. If
this were unduly prolonged, Mr. Ward would appear, "hatted and booted
for the day," and say, "Young gentlemen, I am glad that you can afford
to take life so easily. I am old, and must work for my living!"
Dinner was at four o'clock, supper at half past seven.
At table, Julia sat beside her father; he would often take her right
hand in his left, half unconsciously, and hold it for some time,
continuing the while to eat his dinner. Julia, her right hand
imprisoned, would sit dinnerless, but never dreamed of remonstrating.
She had a habit of dropping her slippers off while at the table. Mr.
Ward one day quietly secured an empty slipper with his foot, and then
said: "My daughter, I have left my seals in my room. Will you be so good
as to fetch them for me?" A moment's agonized search, and Julia went,
"one shoe off and one shoe on," and brought the seals. Nothing was said
on either side, but the habit was abandoned.
Mr. Ward's anxious care for his children's welfare extended to every
branch of their conduct. One evening, walking with Julia, he met his
sons, Henry and Marion, each with a cigar in his mouth. He was much
troubled, and said: "Boys, you must give this up, and I will give it up
too. From this time I forbid you to smoke, and I will join you in
relinquishing the habit."
He never smoked again; nor did the boys--in his presence!
Three lads, young, handsome, brilliant, and eminently social as were the
Wards, could not be kept out of society. They were popular, and would
fain have had Julia, the only one of the three girls who was old enough,
share in their pleasures; but this might not be. Mr. Ward had money and
sympathy to spare for every benevolent enterprise, but he disliked and
distrusted "society"; he would neither entertain it nor be entertained
by it. Our mother quotes an argument between him and his eldest son on
this point:--
"'Sir,' said my brother, 'you do not keep in view the importance of the
social tie.'
"'The social what?' asked my father.
"'The social tie, sir.'
"'I make small account of that,' said the elder gentleman.
"'I will die in defence of it!' impetuously rejoined the younger.
"My father was so amused at this sally that he spoke of it to an
intimate friend: 'He will die in defence of the social tie, indeed!'"
Julia's girlhood evenings were mostly spent at home, with books,
needlework, and music, varied by an occasional lecture or concert, or a
visit to some one of the uncles' houses in the street, which ought, one
would think, to have been called "Ward Street," since at this time
almost the whole family connection lived there.
Much as Julia loved her home, her books and music, she longed for some
of the gayety which her brothers were enjoying. "I seemed to myself,"
she says, "like a young damsel of olden times, shut up within an
enchanted castle. And I must say, that my dear father, with all his
noble generosity and overweening affection, sometimes appeared to me as
my jailer."
Once she expostulated with him, begging to be allowed more freedom in
going out, and in receiving visits from the friends of her brothers. It
may have been on the occasion when he refused to allow the late Louis
Rutherford, of venerated memory, to be invited to the house, "because he
belonged to the fashionable world."
Her father told her that he had early recognized in her a temperament
and imagination over-sensitive to impressions from without, and that his
wish had been to guard her from exciting influences until she should
appear to him fully able to guard and guide herself.
Alas! the tender father meant to cherish a vestal flame in a vase of
alabaster; in reality, he was trying to imprison the lightning in the
cloud. When our mother wrote the words above quoted, on the power of
music over sensitive natures, she was recalling these days, and perhaps
remembering how, denied the society of her natural mates, her
sixteen-year-old heart went out in sympathy and compassion to the young
harper who came to take part in the trios and quartets, and who fell
desperately in love with her and was summarily dismissed in consequence.
Yet who shall say that the father's austere régime did not after all
meet a need of her nature deeper than she could possibly have realized
at the time; that the long, lonely hours, the study often to
weariness,--though never to satiety,--the very fires of longing and of
regret, were not necessary to give her mind that temper which was to
make it an instrument as strong as it was keen?
The result of this system was not precisely what Mr. Ward had expected.
One evening (it was probably after the marriage of his eldest son to
Emily Astor, when he joined perforce in the festivities of the time) he
did actually take Julia to an evening party. She did not dance, but she
was surrounded by eager youths all the evening, and when her father
summoned her to go home, she was deep in talk with one of them. There
was no disobeying the summons; as she turned to take her father's arm,
Miss Julia made a little gesture of farewell, fluttering the fingers of
her right hand over her shoulder, to cheer the disconsolate swain. Mr.
Ward appeared unconscious of this, but a day or two later, on leaving
the room where Julia was sitting, he said: "My daughter,--" and
fluttered his fingers over his shoulder in precise mimicry of her
gesture.
Another anecdote describes an occasion singularly characteristic of both
father and daughter.
Julia was nineteen years old, a woman grown, feeling her womanhood in
every vein. She had never been allowed to choose the persons who should
be invited to the house: she had never had a _party of her own_. The
different strains in her blood were singularly diverse. All through her
life Saxon and Gaul kept house together as peaceably as they might, but
sometimes the French blood boiled over.
Calling her brothers in council, she told them that she was going to
give a party; that she desired their help in making out lists, etc., but
that the occasion and the responsibility were to be all her own. The
brothers demurred, even Sam being somewhat appalled by the prospect; but
finding her firm, they made out a list of desirable guests, of all ages.
It was characteristic of her that the plan once made, the resolve taken,
it became an obsession, a thing that must be done at whatever cost.
She asked her father if she might invite a few friends for a certain
evening: he assented. She engaged the best caterer in New York; the most
fashionable musicians; she even hired a splendid cut-glass chandelier to
supplement the sober lighting of the yellow drawing-room.
The evening came: Mr. Ward, coming downstairs, found assembled as
brilliant a gathering as could have been found in any other of the great
houses of New York. He betrayed no surprise, but welcomed his guests
with charming courtesy, as if they had come at his special desire; the
music sounded, the young people danced, the evening passed off
delightfully, to all save the young hostess. She, from the moment when
the thing was inevitable, became as possessed with terror as she had
been with desire. She could think of nothing but her father's
displeasure, of the words he might speak, the glances he might cast upon
her. During the whole evening, the cup of trembling was at her lips.
The moment the last guest had departed, the three brothers gathered
round her. "We will speak to him!" they cried. "Let us speak to him for
you!"
"No!" said Julia, "I must go myself."
She went at once to the room where her father sat alone. For a moment
she could find no words; but none were needed. Gravely but kindly Mr.
Ward said he was surprised to find that her idea of "a few friends"
differed so widely from his own; he was sorry she had not consulted him
more freely, and begged that in the future she would do so. Then he
kissed her good-night with his usual tenderness, and it was over. The
matter was never mentioned again.
The Wards continued to pass the summers at Newport, but no longer at
good Jacob Bailey's farmhouse. Mr. Ward had bought a house in town,
which a later generation was to know as "The Ashurst Cottage," on the
corner of Bellevue Avenue and Catherine Street.
Here the severity of his rule relaxed somewhat, and the pretty house
became the centre of a sober hospitality. Indeed, Newport was a sober
place in those days. There were one or two houses where dancing was
allowed, but these were viewed askance by many people.
One evening, a dancing party was given by a couple on Bellevue Avenue.
They had a manservant named Salathiel, a person of rigid piety. When
supper-time came, Salathiel was not to be found. The other servants,
being questioned, said that he had rushed suddenly out of the house,
crying, "I won't stay to see those people dancing themselves to hell!"
Though Julia might not dance, except at home, she might and did ride;
first, with great contentment, on a Narragansett pacer, "Jeanie Deans,"
later on a thoroughbred mare, a golden bay named Cora. Cora was
beautiful but "very pranky." After being several times run away with and
once thrown off, it was observed by her sisters that Julia generally
read her Bible and said her prayers before her ride: she has herself
told us how, after being thrown off and obliged to make her way home on
foot, she would creep in at the back door so that no one might see her.
She calls the "cottage" a "delightful house," and speaks with special
pleasure of its garden planted with roses and gooseberry bushes by Billy
Bottomore, a quaint old Newport sportsman, who took the boys shooting,
and showed them where to find plover, woodcock, and snipe. Billy
Bottomore passed for an adopted son of old Father Corné, another Newport
"character" of those days. This gentleman had come from Naples to
Boston, toward the end of the eighteenth century, as a decorative
artist, and had made a modest fortune by painting the walls of the fine
houses of Summer Street, Temple Place, and Beacon Hill. He chose Newport
as his final home, because, as he told Mr. Ward, he had found that the
climate was favorable to the growth of the tomato, "that most wholesome
of vegetables." The Ward boys delighted in visiting Father Corné, and in
hearing him sing his old songs, French and Italian, some of which are
sung to-day by our grandchildren.
Father Corné lived to a great age. When past his ninetieth year, a
friend asked him if he would not like to revisit Naples. "Ah, sir,"
replied the old man, "my father is dead!"
Our mother loved to linger over these old-time figures. The name of
Billy Bottomore always brought a twinkle to her eye, and we never tired
of hearing how he told her, "There is a single sister in Newport, a
sempstress, to whom I have offered matrimony, but she says, 'No.'" The
single sister finally yielded (perhaps when Billy inherited old Corné's
money) and he became a proud and happy husband. "She keeps my house as
neat as a nunnery!" he said. "When Miss E., the housekeeper, died, she
nursed her and laid her out, and when Father Corné died, she nursed him
and laid him out--"
"Yes, Billy," broke in our Aunt Annie, "and she'll lay you out
too!"--which in due time she did.
He congratulated Julia on having girl-children only.
"Give me daughters!" he cried. "As my good old Spanish grandfather used
to say, give me daughters!"
"Of this Spanish ancestor," our mother says, "no one ever heard before.
His descendant died, without daughter or son, of cholera in 185-."
We forget the name of another quaint personage, a retired sea-captain,
who once gave a party to which she was allowed to go; but she remembered
the party, and the unction with which the kindly host, rubbing his hands
over the supper table, exclaimed: "Now, ladies and gentlemen, help
yourselves _sang froidy_!"
The roses and gooseberry bushes of the Newport garden once witnessed a
serio-comic scene. There was another sea-captain, Glover by name, who
had business connections with Prime, Ward & King, and who came to the
house sometimes on business, sometimes for a friendly call. He was a
worthy man of middle age and unromantic appearance; probably the
eighteen-year-old Julia, dreamy and poetic, took no more notice of him
than civility required; but he took notice of her, and one day asked her
to walk out in the garden with him. Wondering much, she went. After some
desultory remarks, the Captain drew a visiting-card from his pocket,
wrote a few words upon it, and handed it to his young hostess. She
read:--
"_Russell E. Glover's_
heart is yours!"