primitive seaside spot, and his childhood was also largely passed in the
house in Brookline built by Colonel Perkins for his daughter. Elliot
Cabot went to school in Boston under the well-known teachers of that
day,—Thayer, Ingraham, and Leverett. When twelve years old, during the
absence of his parents in Europe, he was sent to a boarding-school
in Brookline, but spent Saturday and Sunday with numerous cousins at
the house of Colonel Perkins, their common grandfather, who lived in a
large and hospitable manner, maintaining an ampler establishment than
is to be found in the more crowded Boston of to-day. This ancestor was
a man of marked individuality, and I remember hearing from one of his
grandchildren an amusing account of the scene which occurred, on one
of these Sunday evenings, after the delivery of a total abstinence
sermon by the Rev. Dr. Channing, of whose parish Colonel Perkins was
one of the leading members. The whole theory of total abstinence was
then an absolute innovation, and its proclamation, which came rather
suddenly from Dr. Channing, impressed Colonel Perkins much as it might
have moved one of Thackeray’s English squires; insomuch that he had a
double allowance of wine served out that evening to each of his numerous
grandsons in place of their accustomed wineglass of diluted beverage, and
this to their visible disadvantage as the evening went on.
Elliot Cabot entered Harvard College in 1836 as Freshman, and though he
passed his entrance examinations well, took no prominent rank in his
class, but read all sorts of out-of-the-way books and studied natural
history. He was also an early reader of Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus,”
then just published; and was, in general, quite disposed to pursue his
own course in mental culture. He belonged to the Hasty Pudding Club
and to the Porcellian Club, but spent much time with his classmates,
Henry Bryant and William Sohier, in shooting excursions, which had then
the charm of being strictly prohibited by the college. The young men
were obliged to carry their guns slung for concealment in two parts,
the barrels separated from the stock, under their cloaks, which were
then much worn instead of overcoats. This taste was strengthened by
the example of Cabot’s elder brother, afterwards Dr. Samuel Cabot, an
ornithologist; and as the latter was then studying medicine in Paris,
the young men used to send him quantities of specimens for purposes of
exchange. Dr. Henry Bryant is well remembered in Boston for the large
collection of birds given by him to the Boston Natural History Society.
Soon after his graduation, in 1840, Elliot Cabot went abroad with the
object of joining his elder brother in Switzerland, visiting Italy,
wintering in Paris, and returning home in the spring; but this ended
in his going for the winter to Heidelberg instead, a place then made
fascinating to all young Americans through the glowing accounts
in Longfellow’s “Hyperion.” They were also joined by two other
classmates,—Edward Holker Welch, afterwards well known in the Roman
Catholic priesthood, and John Fenwick Heath, of Virginia, well remembered
by the readers of Lowell’s letters. All of these four were aiming at
the profession of the law, although not one of them, I believe, finally
devoted himself to its practice. Migrating afterwards to Berlin, after
the fashion of German students, they were admitted to the University on
their Harvard degrees by Ranke, the great historian, who said, as he
inspected their parchments, “Ah! the High School at Boston!” which they
thought showed little respect for President Quincy’s parchment, until
they found that “Hoch Schule” was the German equivalent for University.
There they heard the lectures of Schelling, then famous, whom they found
to be a little man of ordinary appearance, old, infirm, and taking snuff
constantly, as if to keep himself awake. Later they again removed, this
time to Göttingen, where Cabot busied himself with the study of Kant,
and also attended courses in Rudolph Wagner’s laboratory. Here he shared
more of the social life of his companions, frequented their Liederkränze,
learned to fence and to dance, and spent many evenings at students’
festivals.
Cabot sums up his whole European reminiscences as follows: “As I look
back over my residence in Europe, what strikes me is the waste of time
and energy from having had no settled purpose to keep my head steady.
I seem to have been always well employed and happy, but I had been
indulging a disposition to mental sauntering, and the picking up of
scraps, very unfavorable to my education. I was, I think, naturally
inclined to hover somewhat above the solid earth of practical life, and
thus to miss its most useful lessons. The result, I think, was to confirm
me in the vices of my mental constitution and to cut off what chance
there was of my accomplishing something worth while.”
In March, 1843, he finally left Göttingen for home by way of Belgium and
England, and entered the Harvard Law School in the autumn, taking his
degree there two years later, in 1845. Renewing acquaintance with him
during this period, I found him to be, as always, modest and reticent in
manner, bearing unconsciously a certain European prestige upon him, which
so commanded the respect of a circle of young men that we gave him the
sobriquet of “Jarno,” after the well-known philosophic leader in Goethe’s
“Wilhelm Meister.” Whatever he may say of himself, I cannot help still
retaining somewhat of my old feeling about the mental training of the
man who, while in the Law School, could write a paper so admirable as
Cabot’s essay entitled “Immanuel Kant” (“Dial,” iv, 409), an essay which
seems to me now, as it then seemed, altogether the simplest and most
effective statement I have ever encountered of the essential principles
of that great thinker’s philosophy. I remember that when I told Cabot
that I had been trying to read Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” in an
English translation, but could not understand it, he placidly replied
that he had read it twice in German and had thought he comprehended it,
but that Meiklejohn’s translation was beyond making out, so that I need
not be discouraged.
After graduating from the Law School, he went for a year into a law
office in Boston, acting as senior partner to my classmate, Francis
Edward Parker, who, being a born lawyer, as Cabot was not, found it
for his own profit to sever the partnership at the end of a year,
while Cabot retired from the profession forever. His German training
had meanwhile made him well known to the leaders of a new literary
enterprise, originating with Theodore Parker and based upon a meeting
at Mr. Emerson’s house in 1849, the object being the organization of a
new magazine, which should be, in Theodore Parker’s phrase, “the ‘Dial’
with a beard.” Liberals and reformers were present at the meeting,
including men so essentially diverse as Sumner and Thoreau. Parker
was, of course, to be the leading editor, and became such. Emerson
also consented, “rather weakly,” as Cabot says in his memoranda, to
appear, and contributed only the introductory address, while Cabot
himself agreed to act as corresponding secretary and business manager.
The “Massachusetts Quarterly Review” sustained itself with difficulty
for three years,—showing more of studious and systematic work than its
predecessor, the “Dial,” but far less of freshness and originality,—and
then went under.
A more successful enterprise in which he was meanwhile enlisted was
a trip to Lake Superior with Agassiz, in 1850, when Cabot acted as
secretary and wrote and illustrated the published volume of the
expedition,—a book which was then full of fresh novelties, and which is
still very readable. Soon after his return, he went into his brother
Edward’s architect office in Boston to put his accounts in order, and
ultimately became a partner in the business, erecting various buildings.
He was married on September 28, 1857, to Elizabeth Dwight, daughter
of Edmund Dwight, Esq., a woman of rare qualities and great public
usefulness, who singularly carried on the tradition of those Essex
County women of an earlier generation, who were such strong helpmates
to their husbands. Of Mrs. Cabot it might almost have been said, as was
said by John Lowell in 1826 of his cousin, Elizabeth Higginson, wife of
her double first cousin, George Cabot: “She had none of the advantages
of early education afforded so bountifully to the young ladies of the
present age; but she surpassed _all_ of them in the acuteness of her
observation, in the knowledge of human nature, and in her power of
expressing and defending the opinions which she had formed.”[21] Thus
Elliot Cabot writes of his wife: “From the time when the care of her
children ceased to occupy the most of her time, she gradually became one
of the most valuable of the town officials, as well as the unofficial
counselor of many who needed the unfailing succor of her inexhaustible
sympathy and practical helpfulness.”
Cabot visited Europe anew after his marriage, and after his return,
served for nine years as a school-committee-man in Brookline, where he
resided. He afterwards did faithful duty for six years as chairman
of the examining committee of Harvard Overseers. He gave for a single
year a series of lectures on Kant at Harvard University, and for a time
acted as instructor in Logic there, which included a supervision of the
forensics or written discussions then in vogue. The Civil War aroused
his sympathies strongly, especially when his brother Edward and his
personal friend, Francis L. Lee, became respectively Lieutenant-Colonel
and Colonel of the 44th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Elliot Cabot
himself enlisted in a drill club, and did some work for the Sanitary
Commission. He also assisted greatly in organizing the Museum of Fine
Arts and in the administration of the Boston Athenæum.
Though a life-long student, he wrote little for the press,—a fact which
recalls Theodore Parker’s remark about him, that he “could make a good
law argument, but could not address it to the jury.” He rendered,
however, a great and permanent service, far outweighing that performed
by most American authors of his time, as volunteer secretary to Ralph
Waldo Emerson, a task which constituted his main occupation for five or
six years. After Emerson’s death, Cabot also wrote his memoirs, by the
wish of the family,—a book which will always remain the primary authority
on the subject with which it deals, although it was justly criticised
by others for a certain restricted tone which made it seem to be, as
it really was, the work of one shy and reticent man telling the story
of another. In describing Emerson, the biographer often unconsciously
described himself also; and the later publications of Mr. Emerson’s
only son show clearly that there was room for a more ample and varied
treatment in order to complete the work.
Under these circumstances, Cabot’s home life, while of even tenor, was a
singularly happy one. One of his strongest and life-long traits was his
love of children,—a trait which he also eminently shared with Emerson.
The group formed by him with two grandchildren in his lap, to whom he was
reading John Gilpin or Hans Andersen, is one which those who knew him at
home would never forget. It was characteristic also that in his German
copy of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” already mentioned, there were
found some papers covered with drawings of horses and carts which had
been made to amuse some eager child. Akin to this was his strong love
of flowers, united with a rare skill in making beautiful shrubs grow
here and there in such places as would bring out the lines and curves of
his estate at Beverly. Even during the last summer of his life, he was
cutting new little vistas on the Beverly hills. His sketches of landscape
in water-color were also very characteristic both of his delicate and
poetic appreciation of nature and of his skill and interest in drawing.
In 1885, while in Italy, he used to draw objects seen from the car window
as he traveled; and often in the morning, when his family came down to
breakfast at hotels, they found that he had already made an exquisite
sketch in pencil of some tower or arch.
His outward life, on the whole, seemed much akin to the lives led by
that considerable class of English gentlemen who adopt no profession,
dwelling mainly on their paternal estates, yet are neither politicians
nor fox-hunters; pursuing their own favorite studies, taking part from
time to time in the pursuits of science, art, or literature, even holding
minor public functions, but winning no widespread fame. He showed, on
the other hand, the freedom from prejudice, the progressive tendency,
and the ideal proclivities which belong more commonly to Americans. He
seemed to himself to have accomplished nothing; and yet he had indirectly
aided a great many men by the elevation of his tone and the breadth of
his intellectual sympathy. If he did not greatly help to stimulate the
thought of his time, he helped distinctly to enlarge and ennoble it. His
death occurred at Brookline, Massachusetts, on January 16, 1903. He died
as he had lived, a high-minded, stainless, and in some respects unique
type of American citizen.
XIX
EMILY DICKINSON
EMILY DICKINSON
Few events in American literary history have been more curious than the
sudden rise of Emily Dickinson many years since into a posthumous fame
only more accentuated by the utterly recluse character of her life. The
lines which formed a prelude to the first volume of her poems are the
only ones that have yet come to light which indicate even a temporary
desire to come in contact with the great world of readers; for she seems
to have had no reference, in all the rest, to anything but her own
thought and a few friends. But for her only sister, it is very doubtful
if her poems would ever have been printed at all; and when published,
they were launched quietly and without any expectation of a wide
audience. Yet the outcome of it was that six editions of the volume were
sold within six months, a suddenness of success almost without a parallel
in American literature.
On April 16, 1862, I took from the post-office the following letter:—
MR. HIGGINSON,—Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse
is alive?
The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have
none to ask.
Should you think it breathed, and had you the leisure to tell
me, I should feel quick gratitude.
If I make the mistake, that you dared to tell me would give me
sincerer honor toward you.
I inclose my name, asking you, if you please, sir, to tell me
what is true?
That you will not betray me it is needless to ask, since honor
is its own pawn.
The letter was postmarked “Amherst,” and it was in a handwriting so
peculiar that it seemed as if the writer might have taken her first
lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum of
that college town. Yet it was not in the slightest degree illiterate,
but cultivated, quaint, and wholly unique. Of punctuation there was
little; she used chiefly dashes, and it has been thought better, in
printing these letters, as with her poems, to give them the benefit
in this respect of the ordinary usages; and so with her habit as to
capitalization, as the printers call it, in which she followed the Old
English and present German method of thus distinguishing every noun
substantive. But the most curious thing about the letter was the total
absence of a signature. It proved, however, that she had written her name
on a card, and put it under the shelter of a smaller envelope inclosed
in the larger; and even this name was written—as if the shy writer
wished to recede as far as possible from view—in pencil, not in ink. The
name was Emily Dickinson. Inclosed with the letter were four poems, two
of which have since been separately printed,—“Safe in their alabaster
chambers” and “I’ll tell you how the sun rose,” besides the two that here
follow. The first comprises in its eight lines a truth so searching that
it seems a condensed summary of the whole experience of a long life:—
“We play at paste
Till qualified for pearl;
Then drop the paste
And deem ourself a fool.
“The shapes, though, were similar
And our new hands
Learned gem-tactics,
Practicing sands.”
Then came one which I have always classed among the most exquisite of her
productions, with a singular felicity of phrase and an aerial lift that
bears the ear upward with the bee it traces:—
“The nearest dream recedes unrealized.
The heaven we chase,
Like the June bee
Before the schoolboy,
Invites the race,
Stoops to an easy clover,
Dips—evades—teases—deploys—
Then to the royal clouds
Lifts his light pinnace,
Heedless of the boy
Staring, bewildered, at the mocking sky.
“Homesick for steadfast honey,—
Ah! the bee flies not
Which brews that rare variety.”
The impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius was as distinct
on my mind at the first reading of these four poems as it is now, after
half a century of further knowledge; and with it came the problem never
yet solved, what place ought to be assigned in literature to what is so
remarkable, yet so elusive of criticism. The bee himself did not evade
the schoolboy more than she evaded me; and even at this day I still stand
somewhat bewildered, like the boy.
Circumstances, however, soon brought me in contact with an uncle of Emily
Dickinson, a gentleman not now living: a prominent citizen of Worcester,
Massachusetts, a man of integrity and character, who shared her
abruptness and impulsiveness, but certainly not her poetic temperament,
from which he was indeed singularly remote. He could tell but little of
her, she being evidently an enigma to him, as to me. It is hard to say
what answer was made by me, under these circumstances, to this letter. It
is probable that the adviser sought to gain time a little and find out
with what strange creature he was dealing. I remember to have ventured
on some criticism which she afterwards called “surgery,” and on some
questions, part of which she evaded, as will be seen, with a naïve skill
such as the most experienced and worldly coquette might envy. Her second
letter (received April 26, 1862) was as follows:—
MR. HIGGINSON,—Your kindness claimed earlier gratitude, but I
was ill, and write to-day from my pillow.
Thank you for the surgery; it was not so painful as I supposed.
I bring you others, as you ask, though they might not differ.
While my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction; but
when I put them in the gown, they look alike and numb.
You asked how old I was? I made no verse, but one or two, until
this winter, sir.
I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so
I sing, as the boy does of the burying ground, because I am
afraid.
You inquire my books. For poets, I have Keats, and Mr. and
Mrs. Browning. For prose, Mr. Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and
the Revelations. I went to school, but in your manner of the
phrase had no education. When a little girl, I had a friend
who taught me Immortality; but venturing too near, himself, he
never returned. Soon after my tutor died, and for several years
my lexicon was my only companion. Then I found one more, but he
was not contented I be his scholar, so he left the land.
You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a
dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better
than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise
in the pool at noon excels my piano.
I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for
thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what
we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them,
because he fears they joggle the mind. They are religious,
except me, and address an eclipse, every morning, whom they
call their “Father.”
But I fear my story fatigues you. I would like to learn. Could
you tell me how to grow, or is it unconveyed, like melody or
witchcraft?
You speak of Mr. Whitman. I never read his book, but was told
that it was disgraceful.
I read Miss Prescott’s “Circumstance,” but it followed me in
the dark, so I avoided her.
Two editors of journals came to my father’s house this winter,
and asked me for my mind, and when I asked them “why” they said
I was penurious, and they would use it for the world.
I could not weigh myself, myself. My size felt small to me. I
read your chapters in the “Atlantic,” and experienced honor for
you. I was sure you would not reject a confiding question.
Is this, sir, what you asked me to tell you? Your friend,
E. DICKINSON.
It will be seen that she had now drawn a step nearer, signing her name,
and as my “friend.” It will also be noticed that I had sounded her about
certain American authors, then much read; and that she knew how to put
her own criticisms in a very trenchant way. With this letter came some
more verses, still in the same birdlike script, as for instance the
following:—
“Your riches taught me poverty,
Myself a millionaire
In little wealths, as girls could boast,
Till, broad as Buenos Ayre,
You drifted your dominions
A different Peru,
And I esteemed all poverty
For life’s estate, with you.
“Of mines, I little know, myself,
But just the names of gems,
The colors of the commonest,
And scarce of diadems
So much that, did I meet the queen,
Her glory I should know;
But this must be a different wealth,
To miss it, beggars so.
“I’m sure ’tis India, all day,
To those who look on you
Without a stint, without a blame,
Might I but be the Jew!
I’m sure it is Golconda
Beyond my power to deem,
To have a smile for mine, each day,
How better than a gem!
“At least, it solaces to know
That there exists a gold
Although I prove it just in time
Its distance to behold;
Its far, far treasure to surmise
And estimate the pearl
That slipped my simple fingers through
While just a girl at school!”
Here was already manifest that defiance of form, never through
carelessness, and never precisely from whim, which so marked her. The
slightest change in the order of words—thus, “While yet at school, a
girl”—would have given her a rhyme for this last line; but no; she was
intent upon her thought, and it would not have satisfied her to make the
change. The other poem further showed, what had already been visible, a
rare and delicate sympathy with the life of nature:—
“A bird came down the walk;
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow raw.
“And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to a wall,
To let a beetle pass.
“He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all around;
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head
“Like one in danger, cautious.
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home
“Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam—
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.”
It is possible that in a second letter I gave more of distinct praise or
encouragement, as her third is in a different mood. This was received
June 8, 1862. There is something startling in its opening image; and in
the yet stranger phrase that follows, where she apparently uses “mob” in
the sense of chaos or bewilderment:
DEAR FRIEND,—Your letter gave no drunkenness, because I
tasted rum before. Domingo comes but once; yet I have had few
pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you,
my tears would block my tongue.
My dying tutor told me that he would like to live till I had
been a poet, but Death was much of mob as I could master, then.
And when, far afterward, a sudden light on orchards, or a new
fashion in the wind troubled my attention, I felt a palsy,
here, the verses just relieve.
Your second letter surprised me, and for a moment, swung. I
had not supposed it. Your first gave no dishonor, because the
true are not ashamed. I thanked you for your justice, but could
not drop the bells whose jingling cooled my tramp. Perhaps the
balm seemed better, because you bled me first. I smile when you
suggest that I delay “to publish,” that being foreign to my
thought as firmament to fin.
If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her; if she did not,
the longest day would pass me on the chase, and the approbation
of my dog would forsake me then. My barefoot rank is better.
You think my gait “spasmodic.” I am in danger, sir. You think
me “uncontrolled.” I have no tribunal.
Would you have time to be the “friend” you should think I need?
I have a little shape: it would not crowd your desk, nor make
much racket as the mouse that dens your galleries.
If I might bring you what I do—not so frequent to trouble
you—and ask you if I told it clear, ’twould be control to me.
The sailor cannot see the North, but knows the needle can. The
“hand you stretch me in the dark” I put mine in, and turn away.
I have no Saxon now:—
As if I asked a common alms,
And in my wandering hand
A stranger pressed a kingdom,
And I, bewildered, stand;
As if I asked the Orient
Had it for me a morn,
And it should lift its purple dikes
And shatter me with dawn!
But, will you be my preceptor, Mr. Higginson?