We walked across what must have been Jarvis Field to what must have been
North Avenue, and there he left me. But before he let me go he held my
hand while he could say that he wished me to dine with him; only, he was
not in his own house, and he would ask me to dine with him at the Parker
House in Boston, and would send me word of the time later.
I suppose I may have spent part of the intervening time in viewing the
wonders of Boston, and visiting the historic scenes and places in it and
about it. I certainly went over to Charleston, and ascended Bunker Hill
monument, and explored the navy-yard, where the immemorial man-of-war
begun in Jackson’s time was then silently stretching itself under its
long shed in a poetic arrest, as if the failure of the appropriation for
its completion had been some kind of enchantment. In Boston, I early
presented my letter of credit to the publisher it was drawn upon, not
that I needed money at the moment, but from a young eagerness to see if
it would be honored; and a literary attache of the house kindly went
about with me, and showed me the life of the city. A great city it
seemed to me then, and a seething vortex of business as well as a whirl
of gaiety, as I saw it in Washington Street, and in a promenade concert
at Copeland’s restaurant in Tremont Row. Probably I brought some
idealizing force to bear upon it, for I was not all so strange to the
world as I must seem; perhaps I accounted for quality as well as quantity
in my impressions of the New England metropolis, and aggrandized it in
the ratio of its literary importance. It seemed to me old, even after
Quebec, and very likely I credited the actual town with all the dead and
gone Bostonians in my sentimental census. If I did not, it was no fault
of my cicerone, who thought even more of the city he showed me than I
did. I do not know now who he was, and I never saw him after I came to
live there, with any certainty that it was he, though I was often
tormented with the vision of a spectacled face like his, but not like
enough to warrant me in addressing him.
He became part of that ghostly Boston of my first visit, which would
sometimes return and possess again the city I came to know so familiarly
in later years, and to be so passionately interested in. Some color of
my prime impressions has tinged the fictitious experiences of people in
my books, but I find very little of it in my memory. This is like a web
of frayed old lace, which I have to take carefully into my hold for fear
of its fragility, and make out as best I can the figure once so distinct
in it. There are the narrow streets, stretching saltworks to the docks,
which I haunted for their quaintness, and there is Faunal Hall, which I
cared to see so much more because Wendell Phillips had spoken in it than
because Otis and Adams had. There is the old Colonial House, and there
is the State House, which I dare say I explored, with the Common sloping
before it. There is Beacon Street, with the Hancock House where it is
incredibly no more, and there are the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue,
and the other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their basements left
hollowed in the made land, which the gravel trains were yet making out of
the westward hills. There is the Public Garden, newly planned and
planted, but without the massive bridge destined to make so ungratefully
little of the lake that occasioned it. But it is all very vague, and I
could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it then in my
place.
I think that I did not try to see Cambridge the same day that I saw
Lowell, but wisely came back to my hotel in Boston, and tried to realize
the fact. I went out another day, with an acquaintance from Ohio; whom I
ran upon in the street. We went to Mount Auburn together, and I viewed
its monuments with a reverence which I dare say their artistic quality
did not merit. But I am, not sorry for this, for perhaps they are not
quite so bad as some people pretend. The Gothic chapel of the cemetery,
unsorted as it was, gave me, with its half-dozen statues standing or
sitting about, an emotion such as I am afraid I could not receive now
from the Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and Santa Crocea in one. I tried
hard for some aesthetic sense of it, and I made believe that I thought
this thing and that thing in the place moved me with its fitness or
beauty; but the truth is that I had no taste in anything but literature,
and did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced.
I did genuinely love the elmy quiet of the dear old Cambridge streets,
though, and I had a real and instant pleasure in the yellow colonial
houses, with their white corners and casements and their green blinds,
that lurked behind the shrubbery of the avenue I passed through to Mount
Auburn. The most beautiful among them was the most interesting for me,
for it was the house of Longfellow; my companion, who had seen it before,
pointed it out to me with an air of custom, and I would not let him see
that I valued the first sight of it as I did. I had hoped that somehow I
might be so favored as to see Longfellow himself, but when I asked about
him of those who knew, they said, “Oh, he is at Nahant,” and I thought
that Nahant must be a great way off, and at any rate I did not feel
authorized to go to him there. Neither did I go to see the author of
‘The Amber Gods’ who lived at Newburyport, I was told, as if I should
know where Newburyport was; I did not know, and I hated to ask. Besides,
it did not seem so simple as it had seemed in Ohio, to go and see a young
lady simply because I was infatuated with her literature; even as the
envoy of all the infatuated young people of Columbus, I could not quite
do this; and when I got home, I had to account for my failure as best I
could. Another failure of mine was the sight of Whittier, which I then
very much longed to have. They said, “Oh, Whittier lives at Amesbury,”
but that put him at an indefinite distance, and without the introduction
I never would ask for, I found it impossible to set out in quest of him.
In the end, I saw no one in New England whom I was not presented to in
the regular way, except Lowell, whom I thought I had a right to call upon
in my quality of contributor, and from the acquaintance I had with him by
letter. I neither praise nor blame myself for this; it was my shyness
that with held me rather than my merit. There is really no harm in
seeking the presence of a famous man, and I doubt if the famous man
resents the wish of people to look upon him without some measure, great
or little, of affectation. There are bores everywhere, but he is
likelier to find them in the wonted figures of society than in those
young people, or old people, who come to him in the love of what he has
done. I am well aware how furiously Tennyson sometimes met his
worshippers, and how insolently Carlyle, but I think these facts are
little specks in their sincerity. Our own gentler and honester
celebrities did not forbid approach, and I have known some of them caress
adorers who seemed hardly worthy of their kindness; but that was better
than to have hurt any sensitive spirit who had ventured too far, by the
rules that govern us with common men.