The tea of that simpler time is wholly inconceivable to this generation,
which knows the thing only as a mild form of afternoon reception; but I
suppose that in 1860 very few dined late in our whole pastoral republic.
Tea was the meal people asked people to when they wished to sit at long
leisure and large ease; it came at the end of the day, at six o’clock, or
seven; and one went to it in morning dress. It had an unceremonied
domesticity in the abundance of its light dishes, and I fancy these did
not vary much from East to West, except that we had a Southern touch in
our fried chicken and corn bread; but at the Autocrat’s tea table the
cheering cup had a flavor unknown to me before that day. He asked me if
I knew it, and I said it was English breakfast tea; for I had drunk it at
the publisher’s in the morning, and was willing not to seem strange to
it. “Ah, yes,” he said; “but this is the flower of the souchong; it is
the blossom, the poetry of tea,” and then he told me how it had been
given him by a friend, a merchant in the China trade, which used to
flourish in Boston, and was the poetry of commerce, as this delicate
beverage was of tea. That commerce is long past, and I fancy that the
plant ceased to bloom when the traffic fell into decay.
The Autocrat’s windows had the same outlook upon the Charles as the
publisher’s, and after tea we went up into a back parlor of the same
orientation, and saw the sunset die over the water, and the westering
flats and hills. Nowhere else in the world has the day a lovelier close,
and our talk took something of the mystic coloring that the heavens gave
those mantling expanses. It was chiefly his talk, but I have always
found the best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like, and
a quick sympathy and a subtle sense met all that I had to say from him
and from the unbroken circle of kindred intelligences about him. I saw
him then in the midst of his family, and perhaps never afterwards to
better advantage, or in a finer mood. We spoke of the things that people
perhaps once liked to deal with more than they do now; of the intimations
of immortality, of the experiences of morbid youth, and of all those
messages from the tremulous nerves which we take for prophecies. I was
not ashamed, before his tolerant wisdom, to acknowledge the effects that
had lingered so long with me in fancy and even in conduct, from a time of
broken health and troubled spirit; and I remember the exquisite tact in
him which recognized them as things common to all, however peculiar in
each, which left them mine for whatever obscure vanity I might have in
them, and yet gave me the companionship of the whole race in their
experience. We spoke of forebodings and presentiments; we approached the
mystic confines of the world from which no traveller has yet returned
with a passport ‘en regle’ and properly ‘vise’; and he held his light
course through these filmy impalpabilities with a charming sincerity,
with the scientific conscience that refuses either to deny the substance
of things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk, so weird did
my fortune of being there and listening to him seem, that I might well
have been a blessed ghost, for all the reality I felt in myself.
I tried to tell him how much I had read him from my boyhood, and with
what joy and gain; and he was patient of these futilities, and I have no
doubt imagined the love that inspired them, and accepted that instead of
the poor praise. When the sunset passed, and the lamps were lighted, and
we all came back to our dear little firm-set earth, he began to question
me about my native region of it. From many forgotten inquiries I recall
his asking me what was the fashionable religion in Columbus, or the
Church that socially corresponded to the Unitarian Church in Boston. He
had first to clarify my intelligence as to-what Unitarianism was; we had
Universalists but not Unitarians; but when I understood, I answered from
such vantage as my own wholly outside Swedenborgianism gave me, that I
thought most of the most respectable people with us were of the
Presbyterian Church; some were certainly Episcopalians, but upon the
whole the largest number were Presbyterians. He found that very strange
indeed; and said that he did not believe there was a Presbyterian Church
in Boston; that the New England Calvinists were all of the Orthodox
Church. He had to explain Oxthodoxy to me, and then I could confess to
one Congregational Church in Columbus.
Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear image of our social
frame in the West, but the fault was altogether mine, if I did. Such
lecturing tours as he had made had not taken him among us, as those of
Emerson and other New-Englanders had, and my report was positive rather
than comparative. I was full of pride in journalism at that day, and I
dare say that I vaunted the brilliancy and power of our newspapers more
than they merited; I should not have been likely to wrong them otherwise.
It is strange that in all the talk I had with him and Lowell, or rather
heard from them, I can recall nothing said of political affairs, though
Lincoln had then been nominated by the Republicans, and the Civil War had
practically begun. But we did not imagine such a thing in the North; we
rested secure in the belief that if Lincoln were elected the South would
eat all its fiery words, perhaps from the mere love and inveterate habit
of fire-eating.
I rent myself away from the Autocrat’s presence as early as I could, and
as my evening had been too full of happiness to sleep upon at once, I
spent the rest of the night till two in the morning wandering about the
streets and in the Common with a Harvard Senior whom I had met. He was a
youth of like literary passions with myself, but of such different
traditions in every possible way that his deeply schooled and definitely
regulated life seemed as anomalous to me as my own desultory and
self-found way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in the
delight of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promise
to continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent patience
with the necessarily insoluble problem.