Farmington Avenue makes with Forest Street, and where the town looks
out into the country, lived Mr. Warner, with Harriet Beecher Stowe and
Mark Twain for his near neighbors. The houses where they once lived are
but a stone’s throw apart. No stones were thrown between them, however,
the three authors having been not on stone-throwing terms, but very
far otherwise. Mr. Warner’s house is a spacious, attractive dwelling,
of the colonial style. It stands, unenclosed, several rods back from
the street, in a grove of noble chestnuts, having no other grounds nor
needing any other. Close behind it, at the foot of a steep, bushy bank,
sweeps the bend of a considerable stream.
The Garden, which Mr. Warner has made so famous, will be looked for
in vain on the premises. Indoors, indeed, the sage “Calvin” is found
enjoying, on a mantel, such immortality as a bronze bust can confer;
but nowhere the Garden. It pertained to another house, where Mr.
Warner lived when “My Summer in a Garden” was written; the fireside
of which, also, is celebrated in his “Back-log Studies,” to not a few
of his readers the most delightful of his books,--a house dear to the
recollection of many a friend and guest. While it is true that Mr.
Warner’s experiment of horticulture was, in the time of it, something
of a reality, its main success, it may be owned without disparagement,
was literary; and with the ripening of its literary product, the
impulse to it expired.
As one would anticipate, the interior of Mr. Warner’s house is genial
and homelike. A cheerful drawing-room opens into a wide, bright
music-room, making, with it, one shapely apartment of generous,
hospitable proportions. The furnishing is simple, but in every item
pleasing. The hand of modern decorative art is there, though under
rational restraint. A chimney-piece of Oriental design rises above
the fireplace of the music-room set with antique tiles brought by Mr.
Warner from Damascus. Other spoils of travel are displayed here and
there, with pictures and engravings of the best. In the nook of a
bow-window is a lovely cast of the Venus of Milo, which, when it was
made a birthday present in the family, was inscribed “The Venus of
my-h’eye.” The house is full of books. Every part of it is more or less
of a library. Laden shelves flank the landings of the broad stairway,
and so on all the way up to the work-room in the third story, where
the statuette of Thackeray on our author’s table seems to survey with
amusement the accumulated miscellaneous mass of literature stacked
and piled around. Upon any volume of this collection Mr. Warner could
lay his hand in an instant--when he found where it was. This opulence
of books was partly due to the fact that Mr. Warner was a newspaper
editor, and in that capacity had the general issue of the press
precipitated upon him. Not that he kept it all. The theological works
and Biblical commentaries mostly went to the minister. And there are
a score of children about, whose juvenile libraries are largely made
up of contributions from “Uncle Charley.” His home was a thoroughly
charming one in every way, and whoever may have had the pleasure of
an evening there must have come away wishing that he might write an
article on the mistress of that house.
Here Mr. Warner spent his forenoons and did his literary work. He
was very industrious, and was an unusually rapid writer. Some of his
most enjoyed sketches that are apt to be quoted as specimens of his
best work, peculiarly exhibiting his delicate and amiable humor and
the characteristic merits of his style, were finished at a sitting.
In the afternoon he was “down town” on duty as editor-in-chief
of _The Hartford Courant_--the oldest newspaper in continuous
existence in this country, having been founded in 1764. His associate
editor-in-chief was Gen. Joseph R. Hawley, of the United States Senate.
The main pursuit of Mr. Warner’s life was journalism. His native turn
was literary. The ink began to stir in his veins when he was a boy.
In his youth he was a contributor to the old _Knickerbocker_ and
_Putnam’s Magazine_. But circumstances did not permit him to follow his
bent. After graduating at college, he engaged for awhile in railroad
surveying in the West; then studied, and for a short time practised,
law; but finally, at the call of his friend Hawley, came to Hartford
and settled down to the work of an editor, devoting his whole strength
to it, with marked success from the outset, and so continued for the
years before, during and after the War, supposing that as a journalist
he had found his place and his career. His editorial work, however, was
such as to give him a distinctly literary reputation; and a share of it
was literary in form and motive. People used to preserve his Christmas
stories and letters of travel in their scrap-books. The chapters of “My
Summer in a Garden” were originally a series of articles written for
his paper, without a thought of further publication. It was in response
to numerous suggestions coming to him from various quarters that they
were made into a book. The extraordinary favor with which the little
volume was received was a surprise to Mr. Warner, who insisted that
there was nothing in it better than he had been accustomed to write. He
was much disposed to view the hit he had made as an accident, and to
doubt if it would lead to anything further in the line of authorship.
But he was mistaken. The purveyors of literature were after him at
once. That was in 1870. Since then his published works have grown to a
considerable list.
His stock of material was ample and was constantly replenished.
His mind was eminently of the inquiring and acquisitive order. His
travels were fruitful of large information to him. He returned from
his journey to the East, which produced “My Winter on the Nile” and
“In the Levant,” with a knowledge of Egyptian art and history such
as few travellers gain, and with a rare insight into the intricate
ins and outs of the Eastern question, past and present. Though not
an orator, hardly a season passed that he was not invited to give an
address at some college anniversary--an invitation which he several
times accepted. He once also delivered, in various colleges, a course
of lectures of great interest and value, on “The Relation of Literature
to Life.” He was an enthusiastic believer in the classic culture, and
has repeatedly written and spoken in its defense. His humor was in his
grain, and was the humor of a man of very deep convictions and earnest
character. Mr. Warner was highly esteemed among his fellow-citizens,
and was often called to serve in one public capacity or another. He
was for a number of years a member of the Park Commission of the city
of Hartford; and he at one time rendered a report to the Connecticut
Legislature, as chairman of a special Prison Commission appointed by
the State. He was a communicant in the Congregational Church, and until
his death in 1900, a constant attendant on public worship.
Mr. Warner was a good-looking man; tall, spare, and erect in frame,
with a strong countenance indicative of thought and refinement. His
head was capacious, his forehead high and clear, and the kindly eyes
behind his eye-glasses were noticeably wide-open. He was remarked
anywhere as a person of decidedly striking appearance. The years
powdered his full beard and abundant clustering hair, but he walked
with a quick, energetic step, with his head thrown back, and pushing
on as if he were after something. In going back and forth daily
between his house and his editorial room in the _Courant_ Building, he
disdained the street railway service, habitually making the trip of
something over a mile each way afoot, in all weathers. His pedestrian
powers were first-rate, and he took great pleasure in exerting them.
He liked to shoulder a knapsack and go off on a week’s tramp through
the Catskill or White Mountains, and whoever went with him was sure
of enough exercise. He was fond of exploration, and once made, in
successive seasons, two quite extensive horseback excursions--with
Prof. T. R. Lounsbury, of the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale,
for his companion--through the unfrequented parts of Pennsylvania,
Tennessee and North Carolina. Of the second of these excursions he
prepared an account in a series of articles for _The Atlantic_. He
had the keenest relish for outdoor life, especially in the woods. His
favorite vacation resort was the Adirondack region, where, first and
last, he has camped out a great many weeks. His delectable little book,
“In the Wilderness,” came of studies of human and other nature there
made. He was an expert and patient angler, but enjoyed nothing so much
as following all day a forest trail through some before-unvisited
tract, halting to bivouac under the open sky, wherever overtaken by
night. He was easily companionable with anybody he chanced to be with,
and under such circumstances, while luxuriating around the camp-fire,
smoking his moderate pipe, would be not unlikely to keep his guide up
half the night, drawing him out and getting at his views and notions on
all sorts of subjects.
JOSEPH H. TWICHELL.
WALT WHITMAN
WALT WHITMAN
IN CAMDEN
It is not a little difficult to write an article about Walt Whitman’s
_home_, for it was once humorously said by himself that he had all his
life possessed a home only in the sense that a ship possesses one.
Hardly, indeed, till the year 1884 could he be called the occupant of
such a definite place, even the kind of one I shall presently describe.
To illustrate his own half-jocular remark as just given, and to jot
down a few facts about the poet in Camden in the home where he died, is
my only purpose in this article. I have decided to steer clear of any
criticism of “Leaves of Grass,” and confine myself to his condition and
a brief outline of his personal history. I should also like to dwell a
moment on what may be called the peculiar outfit or schooling he chose,
to fulfill his mission as poet, according to his own ideal.
In the observation of the drama of human nature--if, indeed, “all
the world’s a stage”--Walt Whitman had rare advantages as auditor,
from the beginning. Several of his earlier years, embracing the age
of fifteen to twenty-one, were spent in teaching country schools in
Queens and Suffolk counties, New York, following the quaint old fashion
of “boarding round,” that is, moving from house to house and farm to
farm, among high and low, living a few days alternately at each, until
the quarter was up, and then commencing over again. His occupation,
for a long period, as printer, with frequent traveling, is to be
remembered; also as carpenter. Quite a good deal of his life was passed
in boarding-houses and hotels. The three years in the Secession War of
course play a marked part. He never made any long sea-voyages, but for
years at one period (1846-60) went out in their boats, sometimes for a
week at a time, with the New York Bay pilots, among whom he was a great
favorite. In 1848-9 his location was in New Orleans, with occasional
sojourns in the other Gulf States besides Louisiana. From 1865 to ’73
he lived in Washington. Born in 1819, his life through childhood and
as a young and middle-aged man--that is, up to 1862--was mainly spent,
with a few intervals of Western and Southern jaunts, on his native
Long Island, mostly in Brooklyn. At that date, aged forty-two, he went
down to the field of war in Virginia, and for the three subsequent
years he was actively engaged as volunteer attendant and nurse on the
battle-fields, to the Southern soldiers equally with the Northern, and
among the wounded in the army hospitals. He was prostrated by hospital
malaria and “inflammation of the veins” in 1864, but recovered. He
worked “on his own hook,” had indomitable strength, health, and
activity, was on the move night and day, not only till the official
close of the Secession struggle, but for a long time afterward, for
there was a vast legacy of suffering soldiers left when the contest was
over. He was permanently appointed under President Lincoln, in 1865,
to a respectable office in the Attorney-General’s department. (This
followed his removal from a temporary clerkship in the Indian Bureau
of the Interior Department. Secretary Harlan dismissed him from that
post specifically for being the author of “Leaves of Grass.”) He worked
on for some time in the Attorney-General’s office, and was promoted,
but the seeds of the hospital malaria seem never to have been fully
eradicated. He was at last struck down, quite suddenly, by a severe
paralytic shock (left hemiplegia), from which--after some weeks--he
was slowly recovering, when he lost by death his mother and a sister.
Soon followed two additional shocks of paralysis, though slighter than
the first. Summer had now commenced at Washington, and his doctor
imperatively ordered the sick man an entire change of scene--the
mountains or the sea-shore. Whitman accordingly left Washington,
destined for the New Jersey or Long Island coast, but at Philadelphia
found himself too ill to proceed any farther. He was taken over to
Camden, and lived there until his death in 1892. It is from this point
that I knew him intimately, and to my household, wife and family, he
was an honored and most cherished guest.
I must forbear expanding on the poet’s career these years, only noting
that during them (1880) occurred the final completion of “Leaves of
Grass,” the object of his life. The house in which he lived is a
little old-fashioned frame structure, situated about gun-shot from the
Delaware River, on a clean, quiet, democratic street. This “shanty,”
as he called it, was purchased by the poet for $2000--two-thirds
being paid in cash. In it he occupied the second floor. I commenced
by likening his home to that of a ship, and the comparison might go
further. Though larger than any vessel’s cabin, Walt Whitman’s room,
at 328 Mickle Street, Camden, had all the rudeness, simplicity, and
free-and-easy character of the quarters of some old sailor. In the
good-sized, three-windowed apartment, 20 by 20 feet, or over, there
were a wood stove, a bare board floor of narrow planks, a comfortable
bed, divers big and little boxes, a good gas lamp, two big tables, a
few old uncushioned seats, and lots of pegs and hooks and shelves. Hung
or tacked on the walls were pictures, those of his father, mother and
sisters holding the places of honor, a portrait of a sweetheart of long
ago, a large print of Osceola the Seminole chief (given to Whitman many
years since by Catlin the artist), some rare old engravings by Strange,
and “Banditti Regaling,” by Mortimer. Heaps of books, manuscripts,
memoranda, scissorings, proof-sheets, pamphlets, newspapers, old and
new magazines, mysterious-looking literary bundles tied up with stout
strings, lay about the floor here and there. Off against a back wall
loomed a mighty trunk having double locks and bands of iron--such
a receptacle as comes over sea with the foreign emigrants, and you
in New York may have seen hoisted by powerful tackle from the hold
of some Hamburg ship. On the main table more books, some of them
evidently old-timers, a Bible, several Shakspeares,--a nook devoted
to translations of Homer and Æschylus and the other Greek poets and
tragedians, with Felton’s and Symonds’s books on Greece,--a collection
of the works of Fauriel and Ellis on mediæval poetry,--a well-thumbed
volume (his companion, off and on, for fifty years) of Walter Scott’s
“Border Minstrelsy,”--Tennyson, Ossian, Burns, Omar Khayyám, all
miscellaneously together. Whitman’s stalwart form itself luxuriated
in a curious, great cane-seat chair, with posts and rungs like ship’s
spars; altogether the most imposing, heavy-timbered, broad-armed and
broad-bottomed edifice of the kind possible. It was the Christmas gift
of the young son and daughter of Thomas Donaldson, of Philadelphia, and
was specially made for the poet.
Let me round off with an opinion or two, the result of my many years’
acquaintance. (If I slightly infringe the rule laid down at the
beginning, to attempt no literary criticism, I hope the reader will
excuse it.) Both Walt Whitman’s book and personal character need to
be studied a long time and in the mass, and are not to be gauged by
custom. I never knew a man who--for all he took an absorbing interest
in politics, literature, and what is called “the world”--seemed to be
so poised on himself alone. Dr. Drinkard, the Washington physician
who attended him in his paralysis, wrote to the Philadelphia doctor
into whose hands the case passed, saying among other things: “In his
bodily organism, and in his constitution, tastes and habits, Whitman
is the most _natural_ man I have ever met.” The primary foundation
of the poet’s character, at the same time, was certainly spiritual.
Helen Price, who knew him for fifteen years, pronounces him (in Dr.
Bucke’s book) the most essentially religious person she ever knew. On
this foundation was built up, layer by layer, the rich, diversified,
concrete experience of his life, from its earliest years. Then his
aim and ideal were not the technical literary ones. His strong
individuality, wilfulness, audacity, with his scorn of convention and
rote, unquestionably carried him far outside the regular metes and
bounds. No wonder there are some who refuse to consider his “Leaves” as
“literature.” It is perhaps only because he was brought up a printer,
and worked during his early years as newspaper and magazine writer,
that he put his expression in typographical form, and made a regular
book of it, with lines, leaves and binding.
During his last years the poet, who was almost seventy-three years old
when he died, was in a state of half-paralysis. He got out of doors
regularly in fair weather, much enjoyed the Delaware River, was a great
frequenter of the Camden and Philadelphia Ferry, and was occasionally
seen sauntering along Chestnut or Market Streets in the latter city. He
had a curious sort of public sociability, talking with black and white,
high and low, male and female, old and young, of all grades. He gave a
word or two of friendly recognition, or a nod or smile, to each. Yet
he was by no means a marked talker or logician anywhere. I know an old
book-stand man who always spoke of him as Socrates. But in one respect
the likeness was entirely deficient. Whitman never argued, disputed, or
held or invited a cross-questioning bout with any human being.
Through his paralysis, poverty, the embezzlement of book-agents
(1874-1876), the incredible slanders and misconstructions that followed
him through life, and the quite complete failure of his book from a
worldly and financial point of view, his splendid fund of personal
equanimity and good spirits remained inexhaustible, and was to the end
of his life amid bodily helplessness and a most meagre income, vigorous
and radiant as ever.
GEORGE SELWYN.
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER
AT AMESBURY
Nearly all the likenesses of Mr. Whittier with which the present public
is familiar, represent an aged man, albeit with a fire flashing in the
eye and illuminating the countenance, like that fire which underlies
the snows of Hecla. But if, after having passed eighty, his face was
still so strong and radiant, in his youth it must have had a singular
beauty, and he kept until the last that eye of the Black Bachelder,
a glint of which was to be seen in the eye of Daniel Webster, and
possibly, tradition says, in that of Hawthorne and of Cushing. At any
rate, he showed a fair inheritance of the strength of will and purpose
of that strange hero of song and romance, his Bachelder ancestor.
But other strains, as interesting as the old preacher’s, are to be
found in Whittier’s ancestry. One of his grandmothers was a Greenleaf,
whence his second name, and she is said to have been descended from a
Huguenot family of the name of Feuillevert, who translated their name
on reaching our shores (as the custom still is with many of our French
and Canadian settlers,) to Greenleaf. The poet himself says:
The name the Gallic exile bore,
St. Malo, from thy ancient mart,
Became upon our western shore
Greenleaf, for Feuillevert.
To the artistic imagination, that likes in everything a reason for its
being, there is something satisfactory in the thought of Huguenot blood
in Whittier’s veins; and one sees something more than coincidence in
the fact that on the Greenleaf coat-of-arms is both a warrior’s helmet
and a dove bearing an olive-leaf in its mouth. Among the Greenleafs
was one of Cromwell’s Lieutenants; and thus on two sides we find our
martial poet born of people who suffered for conscience’ sake, as he
himself did for full forty years of his manhood. The scion of such a
race--how could he pursue any other path than that which opened before
him to smite Armageddon; and yet the grandson of Thomas Whittier,
of Haverhill, who refused the protection of the blockhouse, and,
faithful to his tenets, had the red man to friend, in the days when the
war-whoop heralded massacre to right and left--the grandson of this
old Quaker, we say, must have felt some strange stirrings of spirit
against spirit, within him, as the man of peace contended with the man
of war, and the man of war blew out strains before which the towers of
slavery’s dark fortress fell. For Whittier was not only the trumpeter
of the Abolitionists, in those dark but splendid days of fighting
positive and tangible wrong: he was the very trumpet itself, and he
must have felt sometimes that the breath of the Lord blew through him.
They are terrible days to look back upon, the period of that long,
fierce struggle beneath a cloud of obloquy and outrage; but to those
who lived in that cloud it was lined with light, and in all our sorrows
there was the joy of struggle and of brotherhood, of eloquence and
poetry and song, and the greater joy yet of knowing that all the forces
of the universe must be fighting on the side of right.
The old homestead where Whittier was born, in 1807, is still standing,
and although built more than two hundred years ago, it is in good
condition. It is on a high table-land, surrounded by what in the late
fall and winter seems a dreary landscape. Carlyle’s Craigenputtock, the
Burns cottage, the Whittier homestead, all have a certain correlation,
each of them the home of genius and of comparative poverty, and each
so bleak and bare as to send the imagination of the dwellers out on
strong wings to lovelier scenes. Little boxes and paper-weights are
made from the boards of the garret-floor of the Whittier homestead, as
they are from the Burns belongings; and twigs of the overshadowing elm
are varnished and sold for pen-holders. But the whole house would have
to go to the lathe to meet the demand, if it were answered generally,
for it is the old farmhouse celebrated by “Snowbound,” our one national
idyll, the perfect poem of New England winter life. An allusion to that
strange and powerful character, Harriet Livermore, in this poem, has
brought down upon the poet’s head the wrath of one of her collateral
descendants, who has written a book to prove that nothing which was
said of that fantastic being in her lifetime was true, and that so
far from quarreling with Lady Hester Stanhope as to which of them was
to ride beside the Lord on his reëntry into Jerusalem, she never even
saw Lady Hester. But why any one, descendant or otherwise, should take
offence at the tender feeling and beauty of the poet’s mention of her
is as much a mystery as her life.
It was in the fields about this homestead that fame first found our
poet. For there he bought, from the pack of a traveling peddler, the
first copy of Burns that he had ever seen, and that snatched him away
from hard realities into a land of music; and here the mail-man brought
him the copy of that paper containing his earliest poem, one whose
subject was the presence of the Deity in the still small whisper in
the soul; and here Garrison came with the words of praise and found him
in the furrow, and began that friendship which Death alone severed, as
the two fought shoulder to shoulder in the great fight of the century.