The personal revelations contained in my report of certain
breakfast-table conversations were so charitably listened to and
so good-naturedly interpreted, that I may be in danger of becoming
over-communicative. Still, I should never have ventured to tell the
trivial experiences here thrown together, were it not that my brief
story is illuminated here and there by a glimpse of some shining figure
that trod the same path with me for a time, or crossed it, leaving
a momentary or lasting brightness in its track. I remember that, in
furnishing a chamber some years ago, I was struck with its dull aspect
as I looked round on the black-walnut chairs and bedstead and bureau.
“Make me a large and handsomely wrought gilded handle to the key of that
dark chest of drawers,” I said to the furnisher. It was done, and that
one luminous point redeemed the sombre apartment as the evening star
glorifies the dusky firmament. So, my loving reader,--and to none other
can such table-talk as this be addressed,--I hope there will be lustre
enough in one or other of the names with which I shall gild my page to
redeem the dulness of all that is merely personal in my recollections.
After leaving the school of Dame Prentiss, best remembered by infantine
loves, those pretty preludes of more serious passions; by the great
forfeit-basket, filled with its miscellaneous waifs and deodauds, and
by the long willow stick by the aid of which the good old body, now
stricken in years and unwieldy in person could stimulate the sluggish
faculties or check the mischievous sallies of the child most distant
from his ample chair,--a school where I think my most noted schoolmate
was the present Bishop of Delaware, became the pupil of Master William
Biglow. This generation is not familiar with his title to renown,
although he fills three columns and a half in Mr. Duyckinck's
“Cyclopaedia of American Literature.” He was a humorist hardly robust
enough for more than a brief local immortality. I am afraid we were
an undistinguished set, for I do not remember anybody near a bishop in
dignity graduating from our benches.
At about ten years of age I began going to what we always called the
“Port School,” because it was kept at Cambridgeport, a mile from the
College. This suburb was at that time thinly inhabited, and, being much
of it marshy and imperfectly reclaimed, had a dreary look as compared
with the thriving College settlement. The tenants of the many beautiful
mansions that have sprung up along Main Street, Harvard Street, and
Broadway can hardly recall the time when, except the “Dana House” and
the “Opposition House” and the “Clark House,” these roads were almost
all the way bordered by pastures until we reached the “stores” of Main
Street, or were abreast of that forlorn “First Row” of Harvard Street.
We called the boys of that locality “Port-chucks.” They called us
“Cambridge-chucks,” but we got along very well together in the main.
Among my schoolmates at the Port School was a young girl of singular
loveliness. I once before referred to her as “the golden blonde,” but
did not trust myself to describe her charms. The day of her appearance
in the school was almost as much a revelation to us boys as the
appearance of Miranda was to Caliban. Her abounding natural curls were
so full of sunshine, her skin was so delicately white, her smile and
her voice were so all-subduing, that half our heads were turned. Her
fascinations were everywhere confessed a few years afterwards; and when
I last met her, though she said she was a grandmother, I questioned
her statement, for her winning looks and ways would still have made her
admired in any company.
Not far from the golden blonde were two small boys, one of them very
small, perhaps the youngest boy in school, both ruddy, sturdy, quiet,
reserved, sticking loyally by each other, the oldest, however, beginning
to enter into social relations with us of somewhat maturer years. One of
these two boys was destined to be widely known, first in literature,
as author of one of the most popular books of its time and which is
freighted for a long voyage; then as an eminent lawyer; a man who, if
his countrymen are wise, will yet be prominent in the national councils.
Richard Henry Dana, Junior, is the name he bore and bears; he found it
famous, and will bequeath it a fresh renown.
Sitting on the girls' benches, conspicuous among the school-girls of
unlettered origin by that look which rarely fails to betray hereditary
and congenital culture, was a young person very nearly of my own age.
She came with the reputation of being “smart,” as we should have called
it, clever as we say nowadays. This was Margaret Fuller, the only one
among us who, like “Jean Paul,” like “The Duke,” like “Bettina,”
has slipped the cable of the more distinctive name to which she was
anchored, and floats on the waves of speech as “Margaret.” Her air to
her schoolmates was marked by a certain stateliness and distance, as if
she had other thoughts than theirs and was not of them. She was a
great student and a great reader of what she used to call “naw-vels.” I
remember her so well as she appeared at school and later, that I regret
that she had not been faithfully given to canvas or marble in the day
of her best looks. None know her aspect who have not seen her living.
Margaret, as I remember her at school and afterwards, was tall, fair
complexioned, with a watery, aqua-marine lustre in her light eyes,
which she used to make small, as one does who looks at the sunshine.
A remarkable point about her was that long, flexile neck, arching and
undulating in strange sinuous movements, which one who loved her would
compare to those of a swan, and one who loved her not to those of
the ophidian who tempted our common mother. Her talk was affluent,
magisterial, de haut en bas, some would say euphuistic, but surpassing
the talk of women in breadth and audacity. Her face kindled and reddened
and dilated in every feature as she spoke, and, as I once saw her in a
fine storm of indignation at the supposed ill-treatment of a relative,
showed itself capable of something resembling what Milton calls the
viraginian aspect.
Little incidents bear telling when they recall anything of such a
celebrity as Margaret. I remember being greatly awed once, in our
school-days, with the maturity of one of her expressions. Some themes
were brought home from the school for examination by my father, among
them one of hers. I took it up with a certain emulous interest (for I
fancied at that day that I too had drawn a prize, say a five-dollar one,
at least, in the great intellectual life-lottery) and read the first
words.
“It is a trite remark,” she began.
I stopped. Alas! I did not know what trite meant. How could I ever judge
Margaret fairly after such a crushing discovery of her superiority? I
doubt if I ever did; yet oh, how pleasant it would have been, at about
the age, say, of threescore and ten, to rake over these ashes for
cinders with her,--she in a snowy cap, and I in a decent peruke!
After being five years at the Port School, the time drew near when I
was to enter college. It seemed advisable to give me a year of higher
training, and for that end some public school was thought to offer
advantages. Phillips Academy at Andover was well known to us. We had
been up there, my father and myself, at anniversaries. Some Boston boys
of well-known and distinguished parentage had been scholars there
very lately, Master Edmund Quincy, Master Samuel Hurd Walley, Master
Nathaniel Parker Willis,--all promising youth, who fulfilled their
promise.
I do not believe there was any thought of getting a little respite of
quiet by my temporary absence, but I have wondered that there was not.
Exceptional boys of fourteen or fifteen make home a heaven, it is
true; but I have suspected, late in life, that I was not one of the
exceptional kind. I had tendencies in the direction of flageolets and
octave flutes. I had a pistol and a gun, and popped at everything that
stirred, pretty nearly, except the house-cat. Worse than this, I would
buy a cigar and smoke it by instalments, putting it meantime in the
barrel of my pistol, by a stroke of ingenuity which it gives me a grim
pleasure to recall; for no maternal or other female eyes would explore
the cavity of that dread implement in search of contraband commodities.
It was settled, then, that I should go to Phillips Academy, and
preparations were made that I might join the school at the beginning of
the autumn.
In due time I took my departure in the old carriage, a little modernized
from the pattern of my Lady Bountiful's, and we jogged soberly
along,--kind parents and slightly nostalgic boy,--towards the seat of
learning, some twenty miles away. Up the old West Cambridge road, now
North Avenue; past Davenport's tavern, with its sheltering tree and
swinging sign; past the old powder-house, looking like a colossal
conical ball set on end; past the old Tidd House, one of the finest
of the ante-Revolutionary mansions; past Miss Swan's great square
boarding-school, where the music of girlish laughter was ringing through
the windy corridors; so on to Stoneham, town of the bright lake, then
darkened with the recent memory of the barbarous murder done by its
lonely shore; through pleasant Reading, with its oddly named village
centres, “Trapelo,” “Read'nwoodeend,” as rustic speech had it, and the
rest; through Wilmington, then renowned for its hops; so at last into
the hallowed borders of the academic town.
It was a shallow, two-story white house before which we stopped, just
at the entrance of the central village, the residence of a very worthy
professor in the theological seminary,--learned, amiable, exemplary, but
thought by certain experts to be a little questionable in the matter of
homoousianism, or some such doctrine. There was a great rock that showed
its round back in the narrow front yard. It looked cold and hard; but
it hinted firmness and indifference to the sentiments fast struggling
to get uppermost in my youthful bosom; for I was not too old for
home-sickness,--who is: The carriage and my fond companions had to leave
me at last. I saw it go down the declivity that sloped southward, then
climb the next ascent, then sink gradually until the window in the back
of it disappeared like an eye that shuts, and leaves the world dark to
some widowed heart.
Sea-sickness and home-sickness are hard to deal with by any remedy but
time. Mine was not a bad case, but it excited sympathy. There was
an ancient, faded old lady in the house, very kindly, but very deaf,
rustling about in dark autumnal foliage of silk or other murmurous
fabric, somewhat given to snuff, but a very worthy gentlewoman of the
poor-relation variety. She comforted me, I well remember, but not
with apples, and stayed me, but not with flagons. She went in her
benevolence, and, taking a blue and white soda-powder, mingled the same
in water, and encouraged me to drink the result. It might be a specific
for seasickness, but it was not for home-sickness. The fiz was a
mockery, and the saline refrigerant struck a colder chill to my
despondent heart. I did not disgrace myself, however, and a few days
cured me, as a week on the water often cures seasickness.
There was a sober-faced boy of minute dimensions in the house, who began
to make some advances to me, and who, in spite of all the conditions
surrounding him, turned out, on better acquaintance, to be one of the
most amusing, free-spoken, mocking little imps I ever met in my life.
My room-mate came later. He was the son of a clergyman in a neighboring
town,--in fact I may remark that I knew a good many clergymen's sons at
Andover. He and I went in harness together as well as most boys do, I
suspect; and I have no grudge against him, except that once, when I was
slightly indisposed, he administered to me,--with the best intentions,
no doubt,--a dose of Indian pills, which effectually knocked me out of
time, as Mr. Morrissey would say,--not quite into eternity, but so near
it that I perfectly remember one of the good ladies told me (after I had
come to my senses a little, and was just ready for a sip of cordial and
a word of encouragement), with that delightful plainness of speech which
so brings realities home to the imagination, that “I never should look
any whiter when I was laid out as a corpse.” After my room-mate and I
had been separated twenty-five years, fate made us fellow-townsmen
and acquaintances once more in Berkshire, and now again we are close
literary neighbors; for I have just read a very pleasant article, signed
by him, in the last number of the “Galaxy.” Does it not sometimes
seem as if we were all marching round and round in a circle, like the
supernumeraries who constitute the “army” of a theatre, and that each
of us meets and is met by the same and only the same people, or their
doubles, twice, thrice, or a little oftener, before the curtain drops
and the “army” puts off its borrowed clothes?
The old Academy building had a dreary look, with its flat face, bare and
uninteresting as our own “University Building” at Cambridge, since the
piazza which relieved its monotony was taken away, and, to balance the
ugliness thus produced, the hideous projection was added to “Harvard
Hall.” Two masters sat at the end of the great room,--the principal and
his assistant. Two others presided in separate rooms, one of them the
late Rev. Samuel Horatio Stearns, an excellent and lovable man, who
looked kindly on me, and for whom I always cherished a sincere regard, a
clergyman's son, too, which privilege I did not always find the warrant
of signal virtues; but no matter about that here, and I have promised
myself to be amiable.
On the side of the long room was a large clock-dial, bearing these
words: