My birthplace, the home of my childhood and earlier and later boyhood,
has within a few months passed out of the ownership of my family into
the hands of that venerable Alma Mater who seems to have renewed her
youth, and has certainly repainted her dormitories. In truth, when I
last revisited that familiar scene and looked upon the flammantia mania
of the old halls, “Massachusetts” with the dummy clock-dial, “Harvard”
with the garrulous belfry, little “Holden” with the sculptured
unpunishable cherub over its portal, and the rest of my early
brick-and-mortar acquaintances, I could not help saying to myself that
I had lived to see the peaceable establishment of the Red Republic of
Letters.
Many of the things I shall put down I have no doubt told before in a
fragmentary way, how many I cannot be quite sure, as I do not very often
read my own prose works. But when a man dies a great deal is said of him
which has often been said in other forms, and now this dear old house
is dead to me in one sense, and I want to gather up my recollections and
wind a string of narrative round them, tying them up like a nosegay
for the last tribute: the same blossoms in it I have often laid on its
threshold while it was still living for me.
We Americans are all cuckoos,--we make our homes in the nests of other
birds. I have read somewhere that the lineal descendants of the man
who carted off the body of William Rufus, with Walter Tyrrel's arrow
sticking in it, have driven a cart (not absolutely the same one,
I suppose) in the New Forest, from that day to this. I don't quite
understand Mr. Ruskin's saying (if he said it) that he couldn't get
along in a country where there were no castles, but I do think we lose
a great deal in living where there are so few permanent homes. You will
see how much I parted with which was not reckoned in the price paid for
the old homestead.
I shall say many things which an uncharitable reader might find fault
with as personal. I should not dare to call myself a poet if I did not;
for if there is anything that gives one a title to that name, it is that
his inner nature is naked and is not ashamed. But there are many such
things I shall put in words, not because they are personal, but because
they are human, and are born of just such experiences as those who hear
or read what I say are like to have had in greater or less measure.
I find myself so much like other people that I often wonder at the
coincidence. It was only the other day that I sent out a copy of verses
about my great-grandmother's picture, and I was surprised to find how
many other people had portraits of their great-grandmothers or other
progenitors, about which they felt as I did about mine, and for whom
I had spoken, thinking I was speaking for myself only. And so I am not
afraid to talk very freely with you, my precious reader or listener. You
too, Beloved, were born somewhere and remember your birthplace or your
early home; for you some house is haunted by recollections; to some roof
you have bid farewell. Your hand is upon mine, then, as I guide my pen.
Your heart frames the responses to the litany of my remembrance. For
myself it is a tribute of affection I am rendering, and I should put it
on record for my own satisfaction, were there none to read or to listen.
I hope you will not say that I have built a pillared portico of
introduction to a humble structure of narrative. For when you look at
the old gambrel-roofed house, you will see an unpretending mansion, such
as very possibly you were born in yourself, or at any rate such a place
of residence as your minister or some of your well-to-do country cousins
find good enough, but not at all too grand for them. We have stately
old Colonial palaces in our ancient village, now a city, and a thriving
one,--square-fronted edifices that stand back from the vulgar highway,
with folded arms, as it were; social fortresses of the time when
the twilight lustre of the throne reached as far as our half-cleared
settlement, with a glacis before them in the shape of a long broad
gravel-walk, so that in King George's time they looked as formidably to
any but the silk-stocking gentry as Gibraltar or Ehrenbreitstein to a
visitor without the password. We forget all this in the kindly welcome
they give us to-day; for some of them are still standing and doubly
famous, as we all know. But the gambrel-roofed house, though stately
enough for college dignitaries and scholarly clergymen, was not one of
those old Tory, Episcopal-church-goer's strongholds. One of its doors
opens directly upon the green, always called the Common; the other,
facing the south, a few steps from it, over a paved foot-walk, on the
other side of which is the miniature front yard, bordered with lilacs
and syringas. The honest mansion makes no pretensions. Accessible,
companionable, holding its hand out to all, comfortable, respectable,
and even in its way dignified, but not imposing, not a house for his
Majesty's Counsellor, or the Right Reverend successor of Him who had not
where to lay his head, for something like a hundred and fifty years it
has stood in its lot, and seen the generations of men come and go like
the leaves of the forest. I passed some pleasant hours, a few years
since, in the Registry of Deeds and the Town Records, looking up
the history of the old house. How those dear friends of mine, the
antiquarians, for whose grave councils I compose my features on the
too rare Thursdays when I am at liberty to meet them, in whose human
herbarium the leaves and blossoms of past generations are so carefully
spread out and pressed and laid away, would listen to an expansion of
the following brief details into an Historical Memoir!
The estate was the third lot of the eighth “Squadron” (whatever that
might be), and in the year 1707 was allotted in the distribution of
undivided lands to “Mr. ffox,” the Reverend Jabez Fox of Woburn, it may
be supposed, as it passed from his heirs to the first Jonathan Hastings;
from him to his son, the long remembered College Steward; from him in
the year 1792 to the Reverend Eliphalet Pearson, Professor of Hebrew
and other Oriental languages in Harvard College, whose large personality
swam into my ken when I was looking forward to my teens; from him the
progenitors of my unborn self.
I wonder if there are any such beings nowadays as the great Eliphalet,
with his large features and conversational basso profundo, seemed to me.
His very name had something elephantine about it, and it seemed to me
that the house shook from cellar to garret at his footfall. Some have
pretended that he had Olympian aspirations, and wanted to sit in the
seat of Jove and bear the academic thunderbolt and the aegis inscribed
Christo et Ecclesiae. It is a common weakness enough to wish to find
one's self in an empty saddle; Cotton Mather was miserable all his days,
I am afraid, after that entry in his Diary: “This Day Dr. Sewall was
chosen President, for his Piety.”
There is no doubt that the men of the older generation look bigger and
more formidable to the boys whose eyes are turned up at their venerable
countenances than the race which succeeds them, to the same boys grown
older. Everything is twice as large, measured on a three-year-olds
three-foot scale as on a thirty-year-olds six-foot scale; but age
magnifies and aggravates persons out of due proportion. Old people are
a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible,
it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved
features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details,
like so many microscopes not exactly what human beings ought to be. The
middle-aged and young men have left comparatively faint impressions
in my memory, but how grandly the procession of the old clergymen who
filled our pulpit from time to time, and passed the day under our roof,
marches before my closed eyes! At their head the most venerable David
Osgood, the majestic minister of Medford, with massive front and shaggy
over-shadowing eyebrows; following in the train, mild-eyed John Foster
of Brighton, with the lambent aurora of a smile about his pleasant
mouth, which not even the “Sabbath” could subdue to the true Levitical
aspect; and bulky Charles Steams of Lincoln, author of “The Ladies'
Philosophy of Love. A Poem. 1797” (how I stared at him! he was the first
living person ever pointed out to me as a poet); and Thaddeus Mason
Harris of Dorchester (the same who, a poor youth, trudging along, staff
in hand, being then in a stress of sore need, found all at once that
somewhat was adhering to the end of his stick, which somewhat proved to
be a gold ring of price, bearing the words, “God speed thee, Friend!”),
already in decadence as I remember him, with head slanting forward and
downward as if looking for a place to rest in after his learned labors;
and that other Thaddeus, the old man of West Cambridge, who outwatched
the rest so long after they had gone to sleep in their own churchyards,
that it almost seemed as if he meant to sit up until the morning of the
resurrection; and bringing up the rear, attenuated but vivacious little
Jonathan Homer of Newton, who was, to look upon, a kind of expurgated,
reduced and Americanized copy of Voltaire, but very unlike him in
wickedness or wit. The good-humored junior member of our family
always loved to make him happy by setting him chirruping about Miles
Coverdale's Version, and the Bishop's Bible, and how he wrote to his
friend Sir Isaac (Coffin) about something or other, and how Sir Isaac
wrote back that he was very much pleased with the contents of his
letter, and so on about Sir Isaac, ad libitum,--for the admiral was his
old friend, and he was proud of him. The kindly little old gentleman
was a collector of Bibles, and made himself believe he thought he should
publish a learned Commentary some day or other; but his friends looked
for it only in the Greek Calends,--say on the 31st of April, when that
should come round, if you would modernize the phrase. I recall also one
or two exceptional and infrequent visitors with perfect distinctness:
cheerful Elijah Kellogg, a lively missionary from the region of the
Quoddy Indians, with much hopeful talk about Sock Bason and his tribe;
also poor old Poor-house-Parson Isaac Smith, his head going like a
China mandarin, as he discussed the possibilities of the escape of
that distinguished captive whom he spoke of under the name, if I
can reproduce phonetically its vibrating nasalities of “General
Mmbongaparty,”--a name suggestive to my young imagination of a
dangerous, loose-jointed skeleton, threatening us all like the armed
figure of Death in my little New England Primer.
I have mentioned only the names of those whose images come up pleasantly
before me, and I do not mean to say anything which any descendant might
not read smilingly. But there were some of the black-coated gentry whose
aspect was not so agreeable to me. It is very curious to me to look back
on my early likes and dislikes, and see how as a child I was attracted
or repelled by such and such ministers, a good deal, as I found out
long afterwards, according to their theological beliefs. On the whole,
I think the old-fashioned New England divine softening down into
Arminianism was about as agreeable as any of them. And here I may
remark, that a mellowing rigorist is always a much pleasanter object to
contemplate than a tightening liberal, as a cold day warming up to 32
Fahrenheit is much more agreeable than a warm one chilling down to
the same temperature. The least pleasing change is that kind of mental
hemiplegia which now and then attacks the rational side of a man at
about the same period of life when one side of the body is liable to
be palsied, and in fact is, very probably, the same thing as palsy, in
another form. The worst of it is that the subjects of it never seem to
suspect that they are intellectual invalids, stammerers and cripples
at best, but are all the time hitting out at their old friends with the
well arm, and calling them hard names out of their twisted mouths.
It was a real delight to have one of those good, hearty, happy,
benignant old clergymen pass the Sunday, with us, and I can remember
some whose advent made the day feel almost like “Thanksgiving.” But
now and then would come along a clerical visitor with a sad face and a
wailing voice, which sounded exactly as if somebody must be lying dead
up stairs, who took no interest in us children, except a painful one, as
being in a bad way with our cheery looks, and did more to unchristianize
us with his woebegone ways than all his sermons were like to accomplish
in the other direction. I remember one in particular, who twitted me so
with my blessings as a Christian child, and whined so to me about the
naked black children who, like the “Little Vulgar Boy,” “had n't got no
supper and hadn't got no ma,” and hadn't got no Catechism, (how I wished
for the moment I was a little black boy!) that he did more in that one
day to make me a heathen than he had ever done in a month to make a
Christian out of an infant Hottentot. What a debt we owe to our friends
of the left centre, the Brooklyn and the Park Street and the
Summer street ministers; good, wholesome, sound-bodied, one-minded,
cheerful-spirited men, who have taken the place of those wailing
poitrinaires with the bandanna handkerchiefs round their meagre throats
and a funeral service in their forlorn physiognomies! I might have been
a minister myself, for aught I know, if this clergyman had not looked
and talked so like an undertaker.
All this belongs to one of the side-shows, to which I promised those who
would take tickets to the main exhibition should have entrance gratis.
If I were writing a poem you would expect, as a matter of course, that
there would be a digression now and then.
To come back to the old house and its former tenant, the Professor of
Hebrew and other Oriental languages. Fifteen years he lived with his
family under its roof. I never found the slightest trace of him until a
few years ago, when I cleaned and brightened with pious hands the brass
lock of “the study,” which had for many years been covered with a thick
coat of paint. On that I found scratched; as with a nail or fork, the
following inscription: