the Hudson, not far from Poughkeepsie, within sight of many of the
localities endeared by early associations and ancient Dutch traditions.
There he practised the arts of agriculture and of writing with growing
content. He was as busy within doors as without, and his pen was
driven as regularly as his plough. A story of the Revolutionary period,
and, later, a novel laid partly in this country and partly in England,
and an American comedy, “The Bucktails; or, The Americans in England,”
were fruits of this well-ordered leisure. Five years later he gave this
very comfortable picture of his manner of life:
“I smoke a little, read a little, write a little, ruminate a little,
grumble a little, and sleep a great deal. I was once great at pulling
up weeds, to which I have a mortal antipathy, especially bull’s-eyes,
wild carrots, and toad-flax, _alias_ butter-and-eggs. But my working
days are almost over. I find that carrying seventy-five years on my
shoulders is pretty nearly equal to the same number of pounds; and
instead of labouring myself, I sit in the shade watching the labours
of others, which I find quite sufficient exercise.”
Sitting pipe in mouth on his veranda overlooking the river, watching
the harvesters and the haze on the Catskills on those autumn afternoons
when Rip Van Winkle’s slumbers were deepest, the old man delighted
to recall the golden Knickerbocker age before the “town” had been
lost in the metropolis, to tell the brave story of the youth of the
Knickerbocker group, to draw the portraits of the great men he had
seen in Washington, to castigate John Bull with passionate eloquence
whenever occasion arose, and to chant the elegy of age on the good old
times of the patriots and demigods. A sturdy man, of deep convictions
and passionate feelings, Paulding shared Irving’s sense of humor, high
spirits, and gift for satire; but, while Irving saw the Old World with
sympathetic eyes and reknit the severed ties between the young and the
old country, Paulding remained a provincial in experience and feeling;
loyal, prejudiced, partisan; a man of a city, but not a man of the
world.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
[Illustration]
The last stages of the Knickerbocker age began when Fitz-Greene Halleck
appeared on the scene. He was not to the manner born; he came from
Guilford, Connecticut; but he felt the Knickerbocker spirit and shared
its achievements. Born in one of the loveliest of the old New England
villages, whose distinction was invariably expressed in a green or
common, a Congregational spire, an academy, and rows of graceful elms,
Halleck brought to New York, in 1811, a good school training and skill
in bookkeeping gained in that forerunner of the modern department
store, the country store. The laughter which greeted the appearance of
the “Salmagundi” papers was a thing of the past, and the anger which
met Diedrich Knickerbocker’s story of his ancestors had lost its heat;
the merry youths who gathered at Cockloft Hall had blown the foam off
the wine of life, though they had not lost their zest in the mere act
of living; Irving was boarding on lower Broadway with Brevoort as a
roommate, and there was plenty of good talk but very little work done.
Halleck made a very quiet entrance into the city which was later to
honor him with one of the few statues commemorative of its Men of
Letters. He was a born accountant, and during his long residence in
New York he served two men in this capacity--Mr. Jacob Barker and Mr.
John Jacob Astor. Mr. Astor, at his death in 1848, left him an annuity
large enough in those days of moderate prices to enable him to retire
to his native town and enjoy ease of condition and industrious leisure
in a fine old colonial house which had some associations with Shelley’s
adventurous grandfather.
Halleck did not find his way into the Knickerbocker group at the
start, but he early made acquaintance with Joseph Rodman Drake and
the two became ardent friends. Drake was a young man of captivating
personality; variously gifted and brilliant; a thoroughbred in his
sense of honor and a certain gallant rectitude and courage; a man of
charming fancy, who, at the age of five, was writing clever verse. By
descent he was an American of the Americans, if we accept the dictum
of Richard Grant White that to be an American one must have come of
ancestors who arrived in this country before the War of the Revolution.
Drake had an ancestor in the Plymouth Company, and his father held a
colonelcy in Washington’s army. His mother was equally well-born in the
true sense of the word. His childhood was overshadowed by the death of
both his parents and the bitterness of poverty; but the boy was of a
chivalrous spirit and faced hard conditions with a resolution which was
an assurance of success. His active fancy opened a door of escape from
these conditions, and he played many romantic parts in the drama of his
bleak boyhood. He was an omnivorous reader, his memory let nothing
escape, and despite his lack of opportunity he became exceptionally
well informed. His facility in verse-writing, so early developed, grew
with his years; and his endeavor to make a man of business of himself
failed utterly.
Drake was eighteen and Halleck twenty-three when, on a sailing party
in the bay, they met James De Kay, a young medical student. The day
was genial, youth was at the prow and also at the helm, and Halleck
remarked that “it would be heaven to lounge upon the rainbow and read
Tom Campbell.” It requires some effort of the imagination to recall
Campbell’s popularity at that time and to revive the state of mind
which could see in him a possible relation with the rainbow; but in
youth and fair weather all things tremble on the verge of poetry.
Literature was still in the future for the ardent youths, but life was
within easy reach, and especially the pleasant social life of a small
city. In this same year Irving was beginning to look upon the quiet
pleasures of New York with the jaundiced eye of a veteran man of the
world upon whom the weight of twenty-nine years bore heavily. Writing
of a certain vivacious young woman who played “the sparkler,” he
said: “God defend me from such vivacity as hers in future--such smart
speeches without meaning; such bubble-and-squeak nonsense. I’d as lieve
stand by a frying-pan for an hour and listen to the cooking of apple
fritters”; and he reports that when he was out of the house he did not
stop running for a mile. He speaks irreverently of the “divinities and
blossoms” of the hour, of “rascally little tea parties,” and protests
that he is weary of the “tedious commonplaces of fashionable society.”
The two young poets, hidden in an obscurity which they found
very pleasant, were probably in great awe of the brilliant young
Knickerbocker who had dared to ridicule the town, and who, in the glory
of his local fame, was eager for fresh fields and a wider horizon. They
found very excellent company and much pleasant talk in the city, and
they hunted the joys of youth together. Halleck described Drake at this
time as “perhaps the handsomest man in New York--a face like an angel,
a form like an Apollo.” Music was one of the accomplishments of Drake,
and he played the flute at a time when that instrument and the harp
were the symbols of social cultivation. One of their hostesses was
Mrs. Peter Stuyvesant, whose spacious house, not far from the square
which bears her name, with its gardens and lawn stretching to the
East River, was a centre of social activity. The city ended at Canal
Street, and a visit in the vicinity of old St. Mark’s was like going
to Tarrytown or Trenton in these swift-footed days. Mrs. Stuyvesant
declared, when First Avenue was laid out and this earliest intrusion
into the privacy of a great colonial estate made, that her heart was
broken. A pear-tree which stood long at the corner of Third Avenue and
Thirteenth Street was for many decades the only surviving relic of this
hospitable home.
The country house of Mr. Henry Eckford was a kind of second home to the
young poets, though its distance from the city was a test of their
enjoyment of its hospitality. It stood in a pine grove on Love Lane
where Twenty-first Street crosses Sixth Avenue! New York was surrounded
by spacious country places, not only on the upper part of the island,
but across the three rivers. Among these sylvan homes was that of the
well-known Hunt family, on the Long Island shore almost opposite West
Farms, to which Halleck and Drake made their way by stage and small
boat, and where they often found delightful companionship over Sunday.
On these occasions Halleck gave himself up to the pleasures of “female
society,” but Drake went a-fishing in his old clothes. In the evening
the two friends appeared in different rôles: Halleck told stories and
recited verse, and Drake sang.
Drake had studied medicine and embarked in the business of selling
drugs at one of the corners of Park Row, and there is a tradition
that in this building, which was both a dwelling and a shop, the
second series of satirical papers on the town, “The Croakers,” was
conceived and brought forth. These lively satires, which took the
town by storm, were in verse of varying degrees of wit and melody.
They were clever skits on men and manners, many of them burlesques,
and appeared first in the columns of the “Evening Post,” over the
signature “Croakers,” adapted from “The Good-Natured Man.” This was in
March, 1819, and thenceforth “Croakers” appeared at short intervals
and speedily became the topic of the town. The poets and Coleman, the
editor of the “Evening Post,” adroitly concealed the authorship of
the poems, and great was the speculation on that subject. So great was
the wincing and shrinking at “The Croakers,” that every person was on
tenterhooks; “neither knavery nor folly has slept quietly since our
first commencement,” wrote one of the two poets in a mood of pardonable
elation. Poor Coleman was almost submerged by the flood of imitations
called out by the brilliant success of the series. Conceived in the
spirit of mischief, these facile and fetching rhymes have preserved the
humors of the hour, and, with “Salmagundi,” are entertaining chapters
in the history of the decade between 1819 and 1829.
General Wilson recalls a remark of Drake’s which explains the lightness
and fun of these satirical and burlesque pieces. The young poet had
just corrected the proof of some lines he had recently written, when
he turned a glowing face to his collaborator and cried out: “Oh,
Halleck, isn’t this happiness!” Halleck may be pardoned for writing to
his sister: “We have tasted all the pleasures and many of the pains of
literary fame and notoriety under the assumed name of ‘The Croakers’;
we have had the consolation of seeing and hearing ourselves praised,
puffed, eulogized, execrated, and threatened as much, I believe I can
say with truth, as any writers since the days of Junius. The whole town
has talked of nothing else for three weeks past, and every newspaper
has done us the honour to mention us in some way, either of praise or
censure, but all uniting in owning our talents and genius.”
The poets, meanwhile, were working individually as well as
collectively. In 1819, while the town was still talking about “The
Croakers,” “The Culprit Fay,” written in August, 1816, was gaining a
wide reputation for Drake, and there were many who hailed him as the
coming poet. It was a charming flight of fancy, delicately poised in
mid-air, and kept aloft with that ease which is born of native gift
and skill in versification. The story runs that Cooper and Halleck,
in a warm discussion of the romantic associations of the Scotch lakes
and streams and their rich contributions to poetry, declared that
American rivers offered no such material to the poet. Drake not only
ardently espoused the cause of the American rivers, but in three days’
time re-enforced his argument by writing “The Culprit Fay,” with the
Highlands of the Hudson as a background, but bringing in impressions
received on the shore of Long Island Sound; frankly confessing his
departure from poetic realism in an ingeniously worded note: “The
reader will find some of the inhabitants of salt water a little further
up the Hudson than they usually travel, but not too far for the
purposes of poetry.”
In May, 1819, Drake wrote his popular song, “The American Flag,” which
appeared first in the columns of the “Evening Post,” with very warm
commendation from the editor: “Sir Philip Sidney said, as Addison tells
us, that he could never read the old ballad of ‘Chevy Chase’ without
feeling his heart beat within him as at the sound of a trumpet. The
following lines, which are to be ranked among the highest inspirations
of the Muse, will suggest similar associations in the breast of the
gallant American officer.” The praise was a little too ardent, but
what the song lacked in poetic quality it made up in the ardor of its
patriotism, and it has passed, through the school-books, into the minds
of many generations of American boys, and has been proudly declaimed
on many platforms. It ought to be remembered that Halleck wrote the
closing lines:
Forever float that standard sheet!
Where breathes the foe but falls before us,
With Freedom’s soil beneath our feet,
And Freedom’s banner streaming o’er us.
One of the prominent preachers of the town at that time was the Rev.
Dr. Samuel H. Cox, a Presbyterian of unadulterated Calvinistic views
and the author of the well-known hymn beginning:
We are living, we are dwelling
In a grand and awful time,
In an age on ages telling,
To be living is sublime.
The free poetic temperament of the two poets revolted at the rigid
doctrines powerfully and dogmatically expounded by Dr. Cox, and they
amused themselves by delivering sermons of a very different theology to
a very small but highly appreciative audience of two intimate friends.
Unfortunately, these productions, which would have made a highly
original contribution to sermonic literature, have not been preserved.
The friendship of Halleck and Drake, compounded of love and laughter,
of work and wit, was severed by the death of Drake in September, 1820.
There is no more winning and unworldly chapter in the story of New York
than the generous and loyal comradeship of these two young men, who,
like Irving and Paulding, conspired against the dullness of the town
and made it smile at its own follies. Neither poet had genius, but both
had talent; and Drake, like Hamilton, belongs to the group of men of
brilliancy and personal charm whose presence has given distinction to
New York in every decade since it was founded.
Halleck had written “Fanny” in 1819, a satirical poem which dealt
with contemporary manners and men with a freedom that stopped
short of impertinence, but afforded much amusement to all save the
solemn-minded. The poem passed through several editions and carried
Halleck’s reputation to distant parts of the country. A visit in
Europe gave the young poet themes like “Burns” and “Alnwick Castle”
and “Marco Bozzaris,” which he treated with spirit and metrical
effectiveness. Few boys have grown up in America since 1827 who have
not heard of the Turk who dreamed in his guarded tent of the hour
when Greece, “her knee in suppliance bent, should tremble at his
power.” Perhaps no song written in this country has had wider currency
than this spirited lyric, born at a time when the Greek struggle for
independence appealed to the imagination of the world. In 1848, when
his service in the office of John Jacob Astor was terminated by the
death of that adventurous capitalist, with whom Irving had also had
very pleasant relations, Halleck went back to Guilford and spent
nineteen peaceful years in a house which bore the impress of colonial
taste in its dignity and spaciousness. He had comfortable means
and the leisure so dear to a man of literary taste and habit; but
he never lost his love for the city which had given him such wealth
of friendship. “I shall never cease to ‘hail,’ as the sailors say,
from your good city of New York, of which a residence of more than
fifty years made me a citizen,” he wrote to an admirer who wished to
reproduce a view of his home in Guilford. “There I always considered
myself at home, and elsewhere but a visitor. If, therefore, you wish
to embellish my poem (‘Fanny’) with a view of my country-seat (it was
literally mine every Sunday for years), let it be taken from the top of
Weehawk Hill, overlooking New York, to whose scenes and associations
the poem is almost exclusively devoted.”
Halleck died at Guilford, November 19, 1867, and has been commemorated
by substantial memorials both there and in New York. A granite pillar
was dedicated to his memory in his native town, in the presence of a
great multitude, Bayard Taylor delivering the address and Dr. Holmes
contributing one of his happy occasional poems. In May, 1877, a bronze
statue of Halleck was unveiled in Central Park by the President of the
United States. Bryant, the head of the guild of American poets, and
William Allen Butler, the accomplished and versatile author of “Nothing
to Wear,” delivered addresses, and a poem by Whittier was read.
Poets of far greater genius than Halleck have been far less adequately
honored than he; for he was the poet of a half-century and of a city,
not of an age and a nation. But he lived in a fortunate time; he
was singularly happy in his associations; and he was a delightful
companion, genial and witty, scornful and satirical only in dealing
with impostors and pretenders.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
[Illustration]
That light-handed, urbane, and successful editor and poet, Nathaniel
Parker Willis, long an active and entertaining figure in the New York
of the Thirties and Forties, barely touches the Knickerbocker town of
the Twenties. In the spring of 1829 he started the “American Monthly
Magazine” in Boston--a periodical described at a later day by that
well-known wit, “Tom” Appleton, as “a slim monthly, written chiefly
by himself, but with the true magazine flavor.” Willis had been less
than two years out of college and was without means or experience,
and his enterprise had a fine air of audacity. Events showed that as
a venture it was magnificent, but it was not war! At the end of two
years the magazine was moved to New York and merged in “The Mirror,”
a journal founded in 1823 by George P. Morris and Samuel Woodworth;
was published every Saturday; and had a long and vigorous life under
a succession of names. Woodworth, who wrote a song which was sung at
supper-tables many years afterward--“The Old Oaken Bucket”--inspired,
it is said, by a eulogy on spring water pronounced at a wine party
at Mallory’s, a popular hotel of the time,--had withdrawn from “The
Mirror” before Willis joined its editorial staff; but Willis and Morris
remained partners and devoted friends to the end. They both became
immensely popular--Willis through his versatility and sentiment,
Morris through a series of songs which went to the hearts of a host of
people: “Woodman, Spare that Tree,” “Near the Lake where droops the
Lily,” and “My Mother’s Bible.” He was one of the earliest collators of
literature for general reading, and his “Song Writers of America” and
“The Prose and Poetry of America”--the latter edited in collaboration
with Willis--were eminently useful compilations. He had the rare good
luck to write a successful play founded on Revolutionary events, and a
libretto for an opera; but his talent and fortune lay in his skill in
giving popular sentiment expression in songs. General Wilson records,
as the most impressive evidence of his popularity, that he could at any
time exchange an unread song for a check for fifty dollars. Genial in
manner and with an agreeable address, Morris was also a shrewd man of
affairs.
A vigorous, burly man, often met on the streets in the second decade,
was on his way to become one of the most widely known Americans, whose
name is now familiar throughout Europe. “The Spy” appeared in 1821, and
a few months later passed into a second edition and was dramatized.
In the following year it was published in England, and the English
newspapers began to speak of its author as a “distinguished American
novelist.” The story speedily became the foundation for a world-wide
literary reputation which has suffered little at the hands of time;
the boys in small German towns still organize themselves into tribes
of “Cooper Indians” and perform heroic feats after the manner of the
“Leather-Stocking Tales,” which confirmed and broadened the fame
established by “The Spy.”
James Fenimore Cooper was not born in New York and did not share the
Knickerbocker tradition, but between 1822, when he became a resident of
the metropolis, and 1826, when he went to Europe for a stay of seven
years, he wrote three of the most notable of his novels. “The Pioneers”
was published in 1823, “The Pilot” in 1824, “The Last of the Mohicans”
in 1826. “Lionel Lincoln,” which saw the light in 1825, is negligible,
from the point of view of literature. In 1823 Cooper was living in
Beach Street; after his return from Europe in 1833, he spent a few
winters in the city, but his home was in Cooperstown.
Cooper’s reputation, vigorous intellect, and courage of speech made for
him warm friends as well as bitter enemies, though the latter were of
the period after his return from Europe, when his sharp criticism of
American manners and his impatience with provincial standards involved
him in long-continued and unhappy controversy. “The Bread and Cheese
Club,” of which he was the founder, included in its membership men of
more than local reputation: Kent, Bryant, Morse, Halleck.
A few days before he sailed for Europe in 1826, the Club gave Cooper
a dinner at the City Hotel, at which Chancellor Kent presided, and
speeches were made by Governor Clinton, General Scott, and other
well-known men, who spoke in enthusiastic terms of the distinction he
had brought to the country and the city. Chancellor Kent hailed his
“genius, which has rendered our native soil classic ground, and given
to our early history the enchantment of fiction.”
The high regard in which Cooper was held by the men of Letters in
New York, and the relative positions of the American poets of the
day in the order of merit, are reflected in Halleck’s remark to
General Wilson: “Cooper is colonel of the literary regiment; Irving,
lieutenant-colonel; Bryant, the major; while Longfellow, Whittier,
Holmes, Dana, and myself may be considered captains.” In popular
reputation the place assigned to Cooper was not too high, although
Halleck put himself too complacently in the rank of Holmes and
Whittier. After his return from Europe in 1833, Cooper spent only a few
winters in New York; but the city in which his reputation was born, so
to speak, and in which his literary friendships were formed was the
scene of the most impressive commemoration of his life and fame. A few
months after his death a memorial meeting brought together probably
the most distinguished group of men who had appeared at one time in
the history of the city. Webster presided with his accustomed dignity,
but spoke without his occasional inspiration; while Bryant rose easily
to the highest reach of his theme in an address of great beauty and
feeling.