Another fame so akin to Lincoln's in tragedy, and most worthy of mention
in the story of his great time, is that of a state senator of ours in
the legislative session of 1860. James A. Garfield, of whose coming to
read Tennyson to us one morning in the _Journal_ office I have told in
_My Literary Passions_, was then a very handsome young man of thirty,
with a full-bearded handsome face, and a rich voice suited to reading
"The Poet" in a way to win even reluctant editors from their work to
listen. It is strange that I should have no recollection of meeting
Garfield again in Columbus, or anywhere, indeed, until nearly ten years
later, when I stopped with my father over a night at his house in Hiram,
Ohio, where we found him at home from Congress for the summer. I was
then living in Cambridge, in the fullness of my content with my literary
circumstance, and as we were sitting with the Garfield family on the
veranda that overlooked their lawn I was beginning to speak of the
famous poets I knew when Garfield stopped me with "Just a minute!" He
ran down into the grassy space, first to one fence and then to the other
at the sides, and waved a wild arm of invitation to the neighbors who
were also sitting on their back porches. "Come over here!" he shouted.
"He's telling about Holmes, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and Whittier!"
and at his bidding dim forms began to mount the fences and follow him up
to his veranda. "Now go on!" he called to me, when we were all seated,
and I went on, while the whippoorwills whirred and whistled round, and
the hours drew toward midnight. The neighbors must have been professors
in the Eclectic Institute of Hiram where Garfield himself had once
taught the ancient languages and literature; and I do not see how a
sweeter homage could have been paid to the great renowns I was chanting
so eagerly, and I still think it a pity my poets could not have somehow
eavesdropped that beautiful devotion. Under the spell of those
inarticulate voices the talk sank away from letters and the men of them
and began to be the expression of intimate and mystical experience; and
I remember Garfield's telling how in the cool of a summer evening, such
as this night had deepened from, he came with his command into a valley
of the Kanawha; for he had quickly turned from laws to arms, and this
was in the beginning of the great war. He said that he noticed a number
of men lying on the dewy meadow in different shapes of sleep, and for an
instant, in the inveterate association of peace, he thought they were
resting there after the fatigue of a long day's march. Suddenly it broke
upon him that they were dead, and that they had been killed in the
skirmish which had left the Unionist force victors. Then, he said, at
the sight of these dead men whom other men had killed, something went
out of him, the habit of his lifetime, that never came back again: the
sense of the sacredness of life, and the impossibility of destroying it.
He let a silence follow on his solemn words, and in the leading of his
confession he went on to say how the sense of the sacredness of other
things of peace had gone out of some of the soldiers and never come back
again. What was not their own could be made their own by the act of
taking it; and he said we would all be surprised to know how often the
property of others had been treated after the war as if it were the
property of public enemies by the simple-hearted fellows who had carried
the use of war in the enemy's country back into their own. "You would be
surprised," he ended, "to know how many of those old soldiers, who
fought bravely and lived according to the traditions of military
necessity, are now in the penitentiary for horse-stealing."
Once again I memorably met Garfield in my father's house in Ashtabula
County (the strong heart of his most Republican Congressional district)
where he had come to see me about some passages in Lamon's _Life of
Lincoln_, which was then in the hands of my Boston publishers, withheld
in their doubt of the wisdom or propriety of including them. I think
Garfield was then somewhat tempted by the dramatic effect these passages
would have with the public, but he was not strenuous about it, and he
yielded whatever authority he might have had in the matter to the
misgiving of the publishers; in fact, I do not believe that if it had
been left to him altogether he would have advised their appearance. I
met him for the last time in 1879 (when my wife and I were for a week
the guests of President Hayes), as he was coming, with Mrs. Garfield on
his arm, from calling upon us at the White House. He stopped me and
said, "I was thinking how much like your father you carried yourself,"
and I knew that he spoke from the affection which had been many years
between them. I was yet too young to feel the resemblance, but how often
in my later years I have felt and seen it! As we draw nearer to the door
between this world and the next it is as if those who went before us
returned to us out of it to claim us part of them.