“The kind of woman to whom a fellow takes off his hat when he thinks
of her,” a young cousin, who had been as a brother to her, wrote to me
after her death. “It took six thousand years to make one such. I shall
never know another.”
While on a visit to my old and beloved preceptors, Mrs. Nottingham
and her daughters, then resident in Lexington, Virginia, I met Junius
Fishburn, lately graduated from Washington College—now Washington and
Lee. He was an early and intimate friend of the “Ragland girls,” and
in a way (according to Virginia ways of reckoning kinship) a family
connection of theirs, too remote to deserve recognition in any other
region or society. But he claimed through this the right to omit the
initial steps of acquaintanceship, and I recognized the right. We
were quickly friends—so quickly, that it was no surprise to me when
he enclosed a note to me in a letter to one of the Ragland sisters,
shortly after my return home. I answered it, and thus was established
a correspondence continued through a term of years, without serious
interruption, up to the day when, in the second year after my marriage,
my husband entered my room with a paper in his hand, and a grave look
on his face.
“Here is sad, sad news for you,” he said, gently. “Professor Fishburn
is dead!”
The beautiful young wife, to whom he had been married less than two
years, was a sister of “Stonewall Jackson’s” first wife, a daughter of
Dr. George Junkin, then President of Washington College, and sister of
the poet, Margaret Junkin Preston. After “June’s” death, Mrs. Preston,
my dear friend, wrote to me of a desire her widowed sister hesitated to
express directly to me. Her husband had told her that more of his early
and inner life was told in this series of letters to me than he could
ever relate to any one else. Would I be willing to let her read a few
selected by myself? I had known him before he met her. If the request
were unreasonable, she would withdraw it.
There could have been no surer proof of the sincerity, the purity, and
absolute absence of everything pertaining to love-making and flirtation
in our ten-year-long friendship, than was offered in the circumstance
that, without a moment’s hesitation or the exclusion of a single
letter, I made up a parcel of the epistles, and sent it, with my fond
love, to the widow of my lamented friend.
His letters were but a degree less charming than his conversation. I
considered him, then, and I have not changed my opinion after seeing
much more of the world of society men and brilliant women, one of the
best talkers I have known.
“You have hit it off happily there,” said Mary, at the jolly reading of
the lines on New-Year’s Day, to “us girls.”
And she repeated:
“Social and witty, kind and clever;
His chat an easy, pleasant flow,
A thread you’d never wish to sever.”
He was all this, and more. Our correspondence was a stage, and an
important, in my education. We discussed books, authors, military and
political heroes, psychology, philology, theology, and, as time made us
more intimate with the depths underlying the dancing waves of thought
and fancy, we talked much of religious faith and tenets.
On August 26, 1850, I wrote to Effie:
“My long neglect of correspondents (for you are not the
only neglected one) has caused letters in abundance to
accumulate. Among others there lies before me one from my
friend, Junius F., a full sheet, bearing a date anterior to
your last, and requesting an ‘immediate reply.’ He is a fine
fellow—one of my ‘literary’ friends. Have you chanced to see
anything of his published work? His poems, essays, etc.,
would reflect credit upon any one. I give you the preference
to-day because it will not hurt him to wait.”
The same calm confidence in the liking we bore one another prevailed
throughout our intercourse. Untimely storms and sudden gusts belong
to the tropics of passion, not to the temperate zone of Platonic
affection.
It was about this time that my presumptuous brain conceived the thought
that my friend should be in the pulpit, instead of in the professorial
chair to which he was appointed after winning his degree from the
University of Virginia, whither he had gone from Washington College for
a post-graduate course, and a more thorough equipment for his chosen
life-work. With the Brahmin traditions strong upon me, and the blue
blood of Presbyterianism seething in my veins, I forthwith made out a
“call,” amplified through six pages of Bath post, and dispatched it to
Lexington.
The nearest approach to tenderness in any of our many letters, came out
in his reply:
“A brother’s fondness gushed up in my heart as I read your earnest
pleadings,” was the opening sentence of a masterly exposition of the
reasons that, as he phrased it, “forbid my unhallowed feet to stand
within the sacred desk.” I was wrong, and he was right. His fearless
utterance of the faith which was the mainspring of life and action,
carried force a licensed clergyman seldom gains.
He fought the good fight in the ranks, refusing the commission that had
not, as he believed, the King’s seal.
I had no living elder brother. I hardly felt the loss while Junius
lived. In 1855 he took a year’s leave of absence, and spent it in a
German university. My father and myself were just setting out for
Boston and the White Mountains, and accompanied him as far as New York.
Junius and I were promenading the deck of the Potomac steamer when I
showed him an ambrotype given me by “a friend whom I am sorry you have
never met.”
He looked at it intently for a moment, and, in closing the case,
searched my face with eyes at once smiling and piercing.
“Are you trying to tell me something?” he asked, in the gentlest of
tones.
I answered honestly: “No; there is nothing to tell. We are warm
friends—no more.”
We were interrupted, and had no more opportunity for confidential
chat until that evening, when we strolled from the hotel along the
moonlighted streets to the Capitol. He alluded playfully, in a German
letter, to the never-to-be-forgotten excursion—our last moonlit ramble,
although we did not dream of it then—as “my walk with Corinne to the
Capitol.”
(Men took time and pains to say graceful things, then-a-days!)
He told me that night—what he had already written in brief in a late
letter—of his betrothal, of his happiness, and his ambition to make the
best of himself for the dear sake of the woman who was waiting for him
in the college town engirdled by the blue Virginian mountains.
The next day but one he sailed. My father and myself bade him
“God-speed!” I was glad it so happened.
If I had fewer causes for devout thanksgiving to the Giver of every
good and perfect joy than have crowned my life, I should still account
myself rich in the memory of these two perfect friendships. In my
ignorance of the world that lay without, and far beyond my small circle
of thought, and what I believed were activities, I did not rightly
appreciate the rarity of the gifts. I did know that they were passing
sweet, and longed to prove myself worthy of holding them.
This chapter of my humble record is a sprig of rosemary laid upon
Friendship’s Shrine.