take the reader to the privacy of Elmwood itself, not in this general
way, but at some particular time before its owner discontinued his
method of fire-side traveling under the care of safe and comfortable
household gods, and tempted the real ocean to find an eight-years’
exile. The house--an old-fashioned, roomy mansion, set in a large
triangular wooded space, with grassy areas, under the brow of Mount
Auburn--has been familiarized through description and picture; and the
author himself, of medium height, well set, with a substantial form and
a strikingly attractive face, of light complexion, full eyes, mobile
and expressive features, with the beard and drooping mustache which
are so marked a trait of his picture, and now, like the hair, turning
gray,--he, too, is no stranger. Some ten years ago this figure, in
the “reefer” which he then wore, was well known in the college yard,
giving an impression of stoutness, and almost bluffness, until one
caught sight of the face with its half-recognition and good-will to
the younger men; and in his own study or on the leafy veranda of the
house, one perceived only the simplest elements of unconscious dignity,
the frankness of complete cultivation, and the perfect welcome. If
one passed into his home at that time he would have found a hall that
opened out into large rooms on either hand, the whole furnished in
simple and solid fashion, with a look that betokened long inhabitancy
by the family; and on the left hand he would have entered the study
with its windows overlooking long green levels among the trees on the
lawn--for though the estate is not very extensive in this direction,
the planting has been such that the seclusion seems as inviolable as
in the more distant country. The attachment of its owner to these
“paternal acres” is sufficient to explain why when others left
Cambridge in summer--and then it is as quiet as Pisa--he still found it
“good enough country” for him; but besides this affection for the soil,
the landscape itself has a charm that would content a poet. To the rear
of this room, or rather of its chimney, for there was no partition,
was another, whose windows showed the grove and shrubbery at the back
toward the hill; and this view was perhaps the more peaceful.
Here in these two rooms were the usual furnishings of a scholar’s
study--tables and easy-chairs, pictures and pipes, the whole lending
itself to an effect of lightness and simplicity, with the straw-matting
islanded with books and (especially in the further room) strewn with
scholar’s litter, from the midst of which one day the poet, in search
of “what might be there,” drew from nearly under my feet the manuscript
of Clough’s “Amours de Voyage.” The books filled the shelves upon
the wall, everywhere, and a library more distinctly gathered for
the mere love of literature is not to be found. It is not large as
libraries go--some four thousand volumes. To tell its treasures would
be to catalogue the best works of man in many languages. Perhaps
its foundation-stone, in a sense, is a beautiful copy of the first
Shakspeare folio; Lord Vernon’s “Dante” is among the “tallest” volumes,
and there are many rare works in much smaller compass. The range in
English is perhaps the most sweeping, but the precious part to the
bibliophile is the collection, a very rich one, of the old French and
other romantic poetry. More interesting in a personal way are the
volumes one picks up at random, which are mile-stones of an active
literary life--old English romances, where the rivulet is not of the
text but of the blue-pencil, the preliminary stage of a trenchant essay
on some Halliwell, perhaps; or possibly some waif of a useless task,
like a reëdited “Donne,” to whose _manes_ the unpoetic publisher was
unwilling to make a financial sacrifice. But the limit is reached. That
time in which the scene of this brief description is set, was the last
long summer that Lowell spent in Elmwood.
GEORGE E. WOODBERRY.
[Mr. Lowell died August 12, 1891.--EDITORS.]
DONALD G. MITCHELL (IK MARVEL)
DONALD G. MITCHELL (IK MARVEL)
AT “EDGEWOOD”
Mr. Mitchell is eminently an “author at home.” There are many of
our popular writers--both citizens and country dwellers--whose
environment is a matter of comparative indifference to their readers.
But the farmer of Edgewood has taken the public so pleasantly into
his confidence, has welcomed them so cordially to his garden, his
orchard and his very hearthstone, that--in a literary sense--we
are all his guests and inmates. In the consulship of Plancus--as
Thackeray would say--we Freshmen, after our pilgrimage to that shrine
of liberty, the Judges’ Cave on West Rock, with its kakographic
inscription,--“Oposition [_sic_] to tyrants is obedience to God,”--used
to turn our steps southward to burn our youthful incense upon the
shrine of literature, and see whether the burs had begun to open on the
big chestnut trees that fringed Ik Marvel’s domain. In those days the
easiest approach was through the little village of Westville, which
nestles at the foot of the rock and seems, from a distance, to lay its
church-spire, like a white finger, against the purple face of the
cliff. The rustic gate at the northern corner of Edgewood, whence a
carriage road led to the ridge behind the house, stood then invitingly
open, and a printed notice informed the wayfarer that the grounds were
free to the public on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.
Now, as then, the reveries and dreams of Mr. Mitchell’s early books
continue to charm the fireside musings of many a college dreamer; and
successive generations of Freshmen still find their footsteps tending,
in the golden autumn afternoons of first term, toward the Edgewood
gates. But nowadays the pilgrim may take the Chapel Street horse-car at
the college fence, and after a ten minutes’ ride, dismounting at the
terminus of the line and walking a block to westward, he finds himself
at the brink of what our geologists call “the New Haven terrace.”
Thence the road descends into the water meadows, and, crossing on a new
iron bridge the brackish sluice known as West River, leads straight on
across a gravelly level, till it strikes, at a right angle, the foot of
the Woodbridge hills and the Old Codrington Road (now Forest Street).
On this road lies Edgewood, sloping to the east and south, lifted upon
a shelf of land above the river plain, while behind it the hill rises
steeply to the height of some hundred feet, and shuts off the west
with the border of overhanging woods which gives the place its name.
From his library window Mr. Mitchell can look across a little
foreground of well-kept dooryard, with blossoming shrubs and vines and
bright parterres of flowers set in the close turf; across a hemlock
hedge and a grass-bank sloping down to the road; across the road itself
and the flat below it, checkered with his various crops, to the spires
and roofs and elm-tops of New Haven and the green Fair Haven hills
in the eastern horizon. Southward, following the line of the river,
he sees the waters of the harbor, bounded by the white lighthouse on
its point of rock. Northward is the trap “dyke” or precipice of West
Rock, and northeastward, beyond the town, and dim with a violet haze,
the sister eminence, East Rock. From the driveway which traverses the
ridge behind the homestead the view is still wider and more distinct,
taking in the salt marshes through which West River flows down to the
bay, the village of West Haven to the south, and, beyond, the sparkling
expanse of the Sound and the sandhills of Long Island. Back of the
ridge, westward, stretches for miles a region which used to be known
to college walkers as “The Wilderness,” from its supposed resemblance
to the scene of Grant’s famous campaign: a region of scrubby woodland,
intersected with sled roads and cut over every few years for
fire-wood: a region--it may be said incidentally--dear to the hunters
of the fugacious orchid.
The weather-stained old farmhouse described in “My Farm of Edgewood”
made way some dozen years ago for a tasteful mansion of masonry and
wood-work. The lower story of this is built of stone taken mostly
from old walls upon the farm. The doors and windows have an edging of
brick which sets off the prevailing gray with a dash of red. The upper
story is of wood. There are a steep-pitched roof with dormer-windows,
a rustic porch to the east, a generous veranda to the south, and
vines covering the stone. The whole effect is both picturesque and
substantial, graceful and homely at once. The front door gives entrance
to a spacious hall, flanked upon the south by the double drawing-rooms
and upon the north by the library, with its broad, low chimney opening,
its book-shelves and easy-chairs, its tables and desk and wide
mantel, covered and strewn in careless order with books, photographs,
manuscripts, and all the familiar litter of a scholar’s study. At the
rear of the hall is the long dining-room, running north and south, its
windows giving upon the grassy hillside to the west. A conspicuous
feature of this apartment is the full-length portrait, on the end wall,
of Mr. Mitchell’s maternal grandfather, painted about the beginning of
the century, and representing its subject in the knee-breeches and
silk stockings of the period. Half-length portraits of Mr. Mitchell’s
grandparents, painted about 1830, by Morse, the electrician, hang upon
the side wall of the dining-room, and an earlier portrait of his mother
surmounts the library mantel-piece. Mr. Mitchell’s culture, it will be
seen, does not lack that ancestral background which Dr. Holmes thinks
so important to the New England Brahmin. Three generations of the
name adorn the pages of the Yale Triennial. His grandfather, Stephen
Mix Mitchell, graduated in 1763, was a Representative and Senator in
Congress and Chief Justice of Connecticut. His father, the Rev. Alfred
Mitchell, graduated in 1809, was a Congregational minister at Norwich,
in which city Mr. Mitchell was born, April 12, 1822. The statement
has been made that “Doctor Johns” was a sketch from the Rev. Alfred
Mitchell; but this is not true. Mr. Mitchell’s father died when his
son was only eight years old, and though his theology was strictly
Calvinistic, his personality made no such impression upon the boy as to
enable him to reproduce it so many years after. Some features in the
character of “Dr. Johns” were suggested by Dr. Hall, of Ellington, at
whose once famous school Mr. Mitchell was for some time a pupil. The
name of Donaldus G. Mitchell also appears on the Triennial Catalogue
for the year 1792 as borne by a great-uncle of the present “Donaldus,”
who took his bachelor’s degree in 1841. Mr. Mitchell’s mother was a
Woodbridge, and some four years since he completed an elaborate and
sumptuously-printed genealogy of that family, undertaken by his brother
but left unfinished at his death.
The French windows of the drawing-room open upon the veranda to the
south, and this upon a lawny perspective which is at once an example
of Mr. Mitchell’s skillful landscape-gardening and a surprise to the
stranger, who from the highway has caught only glimpses of sward and
shrubbery through the hedge and the fringe of trees. The Edgewood lawn
is a soft fold between the instep of the hill and the grassy bank that
hangs over the road and carries the hedgerow. It is not very extensive,
but the plantations of evergreens and other trees on either side are
so artfully disposed, advancing here in capes and retiring there in
bays and recesses, that the eye is lured along a seemingly interminable
vista of gentle swales and undulations, bordered by richly-varied
foliage, along the hillside farms beyond, and far into the heart of
the south. Here and there on the steep slope to the right, and high
above the lawn itself, are coppices of birch, hazel, alder, dogwood and
other native shrubs, brought together years ago and protected by little
enclosures, but now grown into considerable trees. North of the house
is the neatly-kept garden, with its beds of vegetables and flowers,
its rows of currant and gooseberry bushes, its box-edged alleys, and
back of all a tall hedge of hemlock, clipped to a dense, smooth wall of
dark green, starred with the lighter needles of this year’s growth. Mr.
Mitchell tells, with a pardonable pride, how he brought from the woods,
in two baskets, all the hemlocks which compose this beautiful screen.
He has two workshops,--his library and his garden; and of the two he
evidently loves the latter best, and works there every day before
breakfast in the cool hours of the morning.
Edgewood has been identified with its present owner for a generation.
He was not always a farmer; but farming was his early passion, and
after several years of writing and wandering, he settled down here in
1855 and returned to his first love. On leaving college he went to
work on his grandfather’s farm near Norwich. He gained at this time
the prize of a silver cup from the New York Agricultural Society, for
plans of farm buildings. He became a correspondent of _The Albany
Cultivator_ (now _The Country Gentleman_), contributing letters from
Europe during his first visit abroad, in 1844-6. This was undertaken in
search of health. He was threatened with consumption, and winter found
him at Torquay in the south of England, suffering from a distressing
and persistent cough. From this he was relieved after a violent fit of
sea-sickness, while crossing the Channel to the island of Jersey, where
he spent half a winter. Another half-winter was passed in tramping
about England, and eighteen months on the continent. These experiences
of foreign travel furnished the material for his first book, “Fresh
Gleanings” (1847). After his return to this country he studied law in
New York, but the confinement was injurious to his health, and in 1848
he went abroad a second time, traveling in England and Switzerland and
residing for a while in Paris. France was on the eve of a revolution,
and Mr. Mitchell’s impressions of the time were recorded in his
second book, “The Battle Summer” (1850). Again returning to America,
he took up his residence in New York, and issued in weekly numbers
“The Lorgnette; or, Studies of the Town, by an Opera-Goer.” This was
a series of satirical sketches, something after the plan of Irving’s
“Salmagundi” papers. They were signed by an assumed name, and even the
publisher was not in the secret of their authorship. The intermediary
in the business was William Henry Huntington, who lately died in Paris,
and who was known for many years to all Americans sojourning in the
French capital as an accomplished gentleman and man of letters. The
“Lorgnette” provoked much comment, and among Mr. Mitchell’s collection
of letters are many from his publisher, detailing the guesses of
eminent persons who called at his shop to ascertain the authorship.
The nucleus of the “Reveries of a Bachelor” was a paper contributed to
_The Southern Literary Messenger_, and entitled “A Bachelor’s Reverie,
in Three Parts: 1. Smoke, signifying Doubt; 2. Blaze, signifying Cheer;
3. Ashes, signifying Desolation.” Mr. Mitchell has a bibliographical
rarity in his library in the shape of a copy of this first paper, in
book form, bearing date Wormsloe, 1850, with the following colophon:
“This edition of twelve copies of the Bachelor’s Reverie, by Ik:
Marvel, hath been: by the Author’s Leave: printed privately for George
Wymberley Jones.” This Mr. Jones was a wealthy and eccentric gentleman,
who amused himself with a private printing-press at his estate of
Wormsloe, near Savannah. The “Reveries,” by the way, has been by all
odds its author’s most popular work, judged by the unfailing criterion
of “sales.” In 1851 Mr. Mitchell was invited by Henry J. Raymond to
edit the literary department of the _Times_, then newly established;
but the labor promised to be too exacting for his state of health,
and the offer was declined. In May, 1853, Mr. Mitchell was appointed
Consul for the United States at Venice. In June of the same year he
was married to Miss Mary F. Pringle, of Charleston, and sailed again
for Europe to enter upon the duties of his consulate. He was attracted
to Venice by the opportunities for historical study, and while there
he began the collection of material looking toward a history of the
Venetian Republic. This plan never found fulfilment, but traces of
Mr. Mitchell’s Venetian studies crop out in many of his subsequent
writings; especially, perhaps, in his lecture on “Titian and his
Times,” read before the Art School of Yale College, and included in
his latest volume, “Bound Together” (1884). In 1854 he resigned his
consulate, and in July of the following year, he purchased Edgewood.
During the past thirty-three years Mr. Mitchell has led the enviable
life of a country gentleman--a life of agriculture tempered by
literature and diversified by occasional excursions into the field of
journalism. He has seen his numerous children grow up about him; he
has entertained at his charming home many of our most distinguished
_literati_; and he has kept open his communication with the reading
public by a series of books and contributions to the periodical press,
on farming, landscape-gardening, and the practical and æsthetic
aspects of rural life. He edited “The Atlantic Almanac” for 1868 and
1869, and in the latter year accepted the editorship of _Hearth and
Home_--a position which made it necessary for him to spend a part of
every week in New York. He was one of the judges of industrial art at
the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, and Commissioner from the United
States at the Paris Exposition of 1878. His taste and experience in
landscape-gardening have been called into play in the laying-out of
the city park at East Rock, and at many private grounds in New Haven
and elsewhere. Of late years the University has had the benefit of his
services in one way and another. He has been one of the Council of the
School of Fine Arts, since the establishment of that department, and
has lectured before the School. In the fall and winter of 1884, he
delivered a course of lectures on English literature to the students
of the University; and the crowd of eager listeners that attended
the series to the close showed that Mr. Mitchell had not lost that
power of interesting and delighting young men which gave such wide
currency to his “Reveries of a Bachelor” and “Dream Life” a generation
ago. Among the other lectures and addresses delivered on various
occasions--several of which are collected in “Bound Together,”--special
mention may be made of the address on Washington Irving, which formed
one of the pleasantest features of the centennial celebration at
Tarrytown in 1883. Irving not only honored Mr. Mitchell with his
personal friendship, but he was, in a sense, his literary master. For
different as are the subjects upon which the two have written, Mr.
Mitchell, more truly than any other American writer, has inherited
the literary tradition of Irving’s time and school. There is the same
genial and sympathetic attitude toward his readers; the same tenderness
of feeling; and, in style, that gentle elaboration and that careful,
high-bred English which contrasts so strikingly with the brusque,
nervous manner now in fashion. Among the treasures of Mr. Mitchell’s
correspondence, none, I will venture to say, are more highly valued by
him than the letters from Washington Irving, although the collection
contains epistles from Hawthorne, Holmes, Dickens, Greeley, and many
other distinguished men. Other interesting _memorabilia_ are the
roughly drawn plans of Bayard Taylor’s house and grounds at “Kennett,”
which the projector sketched for his host during his last visit at
Edgewood.
In appearance Mr. Mitchell is rather under than over the average
height, broad-shouldered and squarely shaped, the complexion fresh and
ruddy, the nose slightly aquiline, the lips firmly shut, the glance of
the eye kindly but keen. The engraving in _The Eclectic Magazine_ for
September, 1867, still gives an excellent idea of its subject, though
the dark, luxuriant whiskers there pictured are now a decided gray. It
may not be generally know that, besides German translations of several
of Mr. Mitchell’s books, his “Reveries” and “Dream Life” have been
reprinted in Germany in Dürr’s Collection of Standard American Authors.
HENRY A. BEERS.
FRANCIS PARKMAN
FRANCIS PARKMAN
IN JAMAICA PLAIN AND IN BOSTON
The surroundings and experiences of Francis Parkman were, in some
respects, very happily in accord with his aims and achievements, and
in other respects as unfortunate as one could imagine. His home in
childhood was near the forest of the Middlesex Fells, Massachusetts;
and his wanderings and shootings in those woods early developed the
two leading interests of his youth--the woods and the Indian. When his
literary taste and ambition were aroused, in Harvard, he chose as his
topic the French and Indian or Seven Years’ War, because it dealt with
these favorite subjects, and, moreover, appealed to his strong sense
of the picturesque. The die was thus cast; and thereafter, through
college, through the law school, indeed through life, it molded his
existence. For some years his reading, study, and vacation journeys all
had a bearing on that particular subject. On leaving college he was
troubled with an abnormal sensibility of the retina, which restricted
the use of his eyes within very narrow limits. As it was apparent,
therefore, that he could not then collect the vast body of materials
required for the history of that war, he concluded to take up, as a
preparatory work in the same direction, the conspiracy of Pontiac. In
accordance with his plan pursued in studying all of his topics, he
visited the localities concerned, and, where it was possible, saw the
descendants of the people to be described. Not content with seeing
the semi-civilized Indians, he went to the Rocky Mountains, in 1846,
lived a while with the Ogallalla Sioux, visited some other tribes, and
studied the character, manners, customs and traditions of the wildest
of the Indians. But he bought this invaluable experience at a dear
price; for while with these tribes on the hunt and the war-path he
was attacked by an acute disorder, and being unable to rest and cure
himself, his constitution was nearly ruined as well as his eyesight.
However, he returned safe if not sound from his perilous journey, and
wrote “The Oregon Trail” (1847) and “The Conspiracy of Pontiac” (1851)
by the help of readers and an amanuensis. He had now to settle himself
in the prospect of years of ill-health and perhaps blindness.