With Paulding, Drake, and Halleck
In the summer of 1797, a tall, well-built lad with a face showing just
a suggestion of melancholy, landed from the weekly market sloop and
walked along the streets of New York for the first time. He was a
country boy, well versed in trees and brooks and used to pathless
hills and rough country roads, and his first impression of New York
was that the dwellers there were great lumpkins. He could not imagine
why they pointed at him and nodded at him and laughed as he walked in
the middle of the street, quite disregarding the paved walk. He
stopped, from time to time, to ask his way, until he came to a little
square brick house in Vesey Street, below Church, bearing the number
43, the home of William Irving. There he went in and was given a good
hug by Mrs. Irving. The boy was James Kirke Paulding, and she who
welcomed him was his sister, with whom he was to live until he should
get a start in the ways and work of the city.
William Irving lived in a house delightfully situated, though no one
would think so now when the spot is jammed with merchants' warehouses,
and sounds of trade fill the air. When Paulding came to town, it was
beyond the ken of the business section, and there were not so many
houses about but that he could enjoy an inviting view. From the front
door he looked straight before him over the grounds of Columbia
College, and to the left across green gardens to the river. From his
little window in the upper story he saw the city to the south, and to
the east St. Paul's Chapel, with the steeple that came to be so gray
with age looking then so new, for it had just been added to the
church. Beyond the graveyard and across Broadway, he had a good view
of the park with its three buildings--the Bridewell, the Almshouse,
and the Prison,--and across the park could see the Park Theatre and
the Brick Church. He could catch a glimpse of Broadway winding over a
hill toward the Stone Bridge at Canal Street, and other roads leading
into the country towards the north, where level stretches led past
rude farmhouses and quaint inns.
The first few years of Paulding in the city, when he was clerk in the
United States Loan Office, were years of hard work. But there were
relaxations, too, for his relationship to William Irving brought him
in contact with the other members of the family--young Washington
Irving and Dr. Peter Irving. When, in a few years, Dr. Irving
published his newspaper, the _Morning Chronicle_, Paulding wrote bits
of prose and verse for it. So his first writings appeared in the same
publication and at the same time as the first writings of Washington
Irving, and it was the interchange of thought in the Vesey Street
house and the opportunities afforded by the _Morning Chronicle_ that
led Paulding's thoughts towards writing as a profession.
Meantime there was much going on in the way of improvement. The new
City Hall was erected in the park; the first free schoolhouse was
opened; and Fulton's _Clermont_ sailed up the Hudson, the first
successful steamboat. A commission had been appointed, too, with the
object of directing the course of the streets, which up to that time
had grown out of the paths left by the cows in their wanderings to
pasture. The commissioners did their work so that, as time went on,
the highways were laid out to form a city of strict right angles. The
cows certainly did their part in a manner that left far more
picturesque twists and turns than were to be found in the upper part
laid out by the commissioners in such a scientifically uninteresting
way.
Paulding lived with William Irving in the Vesey Street house for nine
years, and then the Irvings moved a few blocks the other side of
Columbia College, to 287 Greenwich Street, and Paulding went with
them. Here began the meetings of a literary set, which in a few months
developed into the "Ancient Club of New York," with Washington, Peter,
and William Irving, Paulding, Henry Brevoort, and Gouverneur Kemble
leading members. Kemble owned some land in New Jersey, on which was
located _Salmagundi's_ Cockloft Hall, and on this account was called
"The Patroon." From one of the informal meetings of the Ancient Club,
Washington Irving, his brother William, and Paulding went secretly to
Irving's house in Ann Street to discuss details of _Salmagundi_.
Paulding wrote his share of _Salmagundi_ on the upper floor of the
Greenwich Street house, while the lower floor was the mill of Pindar
Cockloft, conducted by William Irving.
From this house on many an evening the friends went to dine at Dyde's,
the fascinating eating-house near the Park Theatre, then beginning a
long career with the founders of _Salmagundi_ as a foundation for the
memories that were to cluster around its doors, to be passed over,
years later, to Windust's still more famous resort on almost the same
spot.
Paulding was still living with the Irving family when, in 1807, they
went to live at No. 17 in aristocratic State Street, at the corner of
Pearl, facing the Battery Park. Here, overlooking the blue waters of
the bay dotted with sailboats and rowboats, and beyond to the
stretches of Jersey shore, Paulding wrote his contributions to the
_Analectic Magazine_, edited by Washington Irving from his home little
more than a stone's throw away across the Bowling Green; also, _The
Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan_. Here, too,
replying to an attack on his country, he wrote, _The United States and
England_, a pamphlet that attracted the notice of President Madison,
who summoned Paulding to Washington for eight years as Secretary of
the Board of Navy Commissioners. During those eight years he wrote
_The Backwoodsman_ his longest poem and the one which he liked best of
all, a liking not generally shared by his readers; the second series
of _Salmagundi_; and _Koningsmarke_.
Having married Gertrude, the sister of his friend and companion
Gouverneur Kemble, his days were moving smoothly along when the death
of his wife's father took him again to New York and he went to live in
what had long been the home of "The Patroon." This was a mansion of
solid type in Whitehall Street, corner of Stone, set in the midst of a
wide-spreading garden, a site blurred out in later days by the Produce
Exchange. Here he lived during the fourteen years he acted as Navy
Agent at New York, devoting his evenings to literary work, writing his
most successful book, _The Dutchman's Fireside_, also _John Bull in
America_, _Tales of the Good Woman_, and _Westward Ho!_ In the evening
he went often to the Park Theatre, and came to know James H. Hackett,
the greatest Falstaff America had seen, writing for him _The Lion of
the West_, which Hackett acted for many years. And then after fifteen
years in this house he left it, and with his family went to Washington
as Secretary of the Navy.
Once more, in 1841, he returned to New York, to live in Beach Street,
then the fashionable St. John's Park neighborhood. But, his wife dying
before he was really settled, he soon left New York and passed the
last days of his life in Dutchess County, the region of his birth.
At about the time Paulding moved into the State Street house two young
men met one afternoon at the home of a mutual friend. One was
studying medicine and beginning to see something more in life than a
struggle for mere existence. He was Joseph Rodman Drake. The other,
Fitz-Greene Halleck, was a bookkeeper and had but just come from his
birthplace in Guilford, Connecticut. He had read much poetry and had
written some stray verse. A few days after their meeting, the two came
together again in the rooms where Halleck boarded in Greenwich Street,
not half a dozen houses from the place where Washington Irving was
living with Mrs. Brandish. The second meeting was the real start of an
inseparable friendship which has caused them to be looked upon as the
Orestes and Pylades of American poets.
Halleck had begun his work for Jacob Barker. The warehouse where he
was employed stands yet and can easily be found by walking down John
Street to Burling Slip, and so on around the corner into South Street
by the waterside. Drake ofttimes took that walk and sat there by the
side of his friend's desk. Often, too, in the late afternoon, Halleck
walked from there to the green that since has been called the City
Hall Park, and sat until Drake came from his studies in the nearby
College of Physicians and Surgeons. The college was part of Columbia,
which lay to the west of the green. In time the city overgrew the
college grounds so completely that those interested in remembering
where they had been set up a tablet at West Broadway and Murray
Street, as a reminder that they should not be entirely forgotten. From
the park it was the wont of the youthful poets to walk along Broadway
below Trinity Church--then the fashionable promenade,--and so on to
the Battery, past where Irving had lived by the Bowling Green, past
where Paulding was then living.
The time came when Drake was graduated, and then there were the long
evenings together back of his office in the store numbered 121 Bowery,
just above Hester Street. From this house the friends made their long
excursions across the Harlem River, far beyond the town, into the
romantic Bronx of which Drake sang so often and so well.
One night, starting from the Bowery shop, Drake took Halleck down
Broadway into Thames Street, and there, back of the City Hotel, dined
him in a dingy little public house, the first of many pleasant
evenings there. It was the ale-house kept by William Reynolds, a
genial, red-faced man who had been a grave-digger in the nearby
Trinity Churchyard.
The tavern remained a place of entertainment for close upon a hundred
years, most of the time known as "Old Tom's," from Reynolds's
successor. It came to be a landmark for the curious, but as the
curious always stood outside and never by any chance went in to buy of
what was on sale there, it went the way of all old places. To-day, if
you turn into Thames Street, from busy Broadway, you come upon a mass
of buildings in perpetual shade, and with a decidedly provincial air
not at all in keeping with the up-to-date city. A walk of half a block
brings you to Temple Street--a thoroughfare leading nowhere in
particular, but which wise chroniclers have quarrelled over, some
urging that it came by its name because of being close by Trinity
Church, which is a temple of worship, and others quite as vigorously
contending that it took its name from Charlotte Temple, who lived
nearby. Here you find Reynolds's tavern metamorphosed into a modern
place of business, and though the street is still quaint-appearing,
every suggestion of romance has vanished from the tavern. Nevertheless
the curious, who in its days of need regarded it from afar, love to
sit in it, surrounded by modern conveniences, and tell what it was
like "in Drake's time."
Drake prospered, and after a time set up his pharmacy in the busiest
part of town, that later grew to be the core of Newspaper Row. When
Drake lived in Park Row, the second door from Beekman Street, he and
Halleck hit upon the idea of the "Croaker Papers," a series of satires
in verse, printed in the _Evening Post_, in which the poets sailed
into the public characters of the day. This was the house where
Halleck went to read his _Fanny_ to Drake, and made some corrections
at his friend's suggestion before he gave it to the world.
[Illustration: The Shakespeare Tavern]
Around the corner from the Park Row shop, the Shakespeare Tavern was
conducted by Thomas Hawkins Hodgkinson, the actor; a resort for the
actors, the artists, the writers, the talkers of the town; a popular
rendezvous quite in contrast to Reynolds's quiet inn. It stood at the
southwest corner of Fulton and Nassau streets, a double house of
brick, having for its sign a bust of the great poet over the door. In
after years a tablet was set to mark the spot. Halleck tells of a
meeting here with James Lawson, the journalist, who came to write the
_Tales and Sketches of a Cosmopolite_.
On a night when Drake and Paulding and some others gathered for a
friendly evening there arose a discussion, argued for and against by
all the company, as to whether or not the rivers of America were rich
enough in legend and romance to lend themselves to poetic treatment.
And after the talk had lengthened into the morning hours, Drake went
to the room over his Park Row shop to put his view of the subject into
writing. In a few days he read to Halleck the poem on which his fame
chiefly rests, _The Culprit Fay_--a poetic fantasy illumining the
Highlands of the Hudson.
In the year 1820, Halleck sat in the Park Row house by the bedside of
his friend, who was dying of consumption, and here, at the age of
twenty-five, Joseph Rodman Drake passed away. Halleck followed the
coffin to that beautiful spot beyond the Harlem that they both loved
so well, and there by the side of the Bronx streamlet the poet Drake
was buried. In the depth of his grief Halleck wrote the lines:
Green be the turf above thee,
Friend of my better days;
None knew thee but to love thee,
None named thee but to praise.
And now after more than three quarters of a century the words still
murmur their message of friendship and sorrow above Drake's grave. The
city has sped on far beyond the little graveyard, and harsh sounds
throb where once was only the singing of birds; but the consecrated
spot remains, cared for year by year as well as may be in despite of
relic-hunting vandals.
Halleck outlived his friend by many long years. He gave up bookkeeping
for Jacob Barker, and during eighteen years was the confidential
manager of the affairs of John Jacob Astor. But he never failed to
regret the comrade of his youth, losing with him much of his
inspiration.
[Illustration: The Jumel Mansion]
Half an hour's journey from Drake's grave, on the western side of the
Harlem River, there stands, at One Hundred and Sixtieth Street and
Edgecombe Avenue, a house on a bluff so high above the river that it
can be seen from afar--white in the sunlight. This is the Morris
house, where Mary Philipse lived after she became the wife of Roger
Morris; where Washington had his headquarters; where Madame Jumel
lived, and where she married Aaron Burr. To the one who strolls in the
footsteps of _litterateurs_ of a bygone day, it is, more than all, the
house where Halleck visited, and where he wrote _Marco Bozzaris_.
Although this was his most widely known poem, and though it was
written five years after the death of Drake, the memory of his friend
was like a fresh sorrow to him while he wrote. During forty odd years
from that time he continued the gently courteous, witty talker, the
dignified life of each gathering he attended. But, as he knew so well,
his Muse was sorely wounded when Drake died, and the fuller poetic
life that might have been his was buried on the green slope of the
Bronx with his friend.