Half a Century Ago
Like many a landed estate, like many a quiet village, like many a
battle-ground, like many a winding and historic road, like so many
other places of interest of which the island of Manhattan has been the
scene in days agone--Minniesland is not easy to locate. Relentlessly
and remorselessly the great masses of brick and mortar have forged
ahead in their furtherance of the city's growth, seeking a level as
they spread, dominating the island, levelling the hills, and
stretching over valleys until the surface of the land is altered
beyond all knowing. Minniesland is one of the almost buried districts
of the great city. Its last surviving relic, a square ornamental
structure, is the one token that it ever existed. Now that the town
has surrounded this building, and streets have cut through and
mutilated the first plan of the district, this house may be found
standing where One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street slopes down to the
Hudson River. Enter it; pass through its ancient halls, and, standing
on its porch, blot from the mind the spot as it is and reconstruct it
as it was half a century ago.
Fifty years ago the city was far away there to the south, and this
house, miles and miles away up-country, was at the edge of a forest
stretching down the hillside to the river. There were other farmhouses
around it. To the north was the mansion where Colonel Morris had lived
before the Revolution; where Madame Jumel in later days had married
Aaron Burr. To the south was the square frame building, close by a
clump of thirteen trees, where Alexander Hamilton had lived and where
his widow stayed on after his death.
Forgetting for a moment these old-time surroundings of the house by
the forest edge, turn to the building itself, and imagine at the
window a man sitting. He has long hair and clear blue eyes. He is
painting at a small easel and working in quite a wonderful manner, for
he is ambidextrous. He stops in his work and looks over the trees
towards the Hudson. If that ever-moving river recalls to him his past
life, John James Audubon, ornithologist, is reviewing a strange and
adventurous career in many countries, full of losses, of suffering, of
changes, of perils. He thinks of himself as a boy wandering through
the dense, hot wilds of San Domingo; as a youth hard at his art
studies in Paris under the master David; as a man at his father's
country place on the Schuylkill, failing utterly and absolutely when
he goes into business, and letting his father's fortune slip away from
his nerveless grasp. He remembers, too, his marriage, and how his wife
followed his restless career with unchanging love and remained always
a balance-wheel to his impetuosity. He recalls how, through all the
changes of that early and unsettled life, the naturalist-love born in
him when he roamed the tropical home of his youth was always strongest
in his nature, and was constantly cropping out in his mania for
collecting beautiful things that were quite worthless from a
commercial point of view, just as it was shown in his personal
appearance; for his manner of dressing, always with his hair falling
over his shoulders, marked him as a man regardless of conventionality,
a man so bound within the circle of his own thoughts that he had
little time or inclination to peek out and see which way the world was
moving.
[Illustration: Audubon's Home
156th St. and N. River]
Audubon had passed through the hardest struggles of his life, had
travelled in England, in France, in Scotland, arranging for the
publication of his bird pictures, that remarkable work which set his
memory apart; he had succeeded in his life's object, and at the close
of 1840 had come here to this forest hillside by the Hudson, built
the house on the estate Minniesland, named in honor of his wife, made
it a luxurious abode, and there gathered his friends about him.
With this home of Audubon there is associated a memory of the early
days of the telegraph. When Samuel F.B. Morse built the first
telegraph line to Philadelphia, he had it strung across the river from
Fort Lee to the basement of Audubon's house, and there he received the
first telegraphic message ever sent to the island of Manhattan. Here
Audubon lived, wrote, and painted until even his rugged strength was
worn out. He worked until those clever ambidextrous hands lost the
cunning to work out the forms his active brain could still conceive.
The day came, in 1851, when he died, fortunately before any great
change had come over the beauties of Minniesland. The peacefulness of
Trinity Cemetery, which takes in part of the Audubon farm, is still
faintly reminiscent of the scene of the ornithologist's later life,
and there, close by the old house, is the grave of Audubon, and upon
his tomb are sculptured the birds he loved so well, now keeping watch
over him.
[Illustration: Clement C. Moore's House
Chelsea]
While Audubon worked in his out-of-town retreat, another scholar and
writer lived farther down the island towards the city. Clement C.
Moore lived in a little district of his own called Chelsea Village,
now merged into the city by so deft a laying out of streets that there
is little irregularity at the point where town and village met. A bit
of the old village remains exactly as it was in the General
Theological Seminary, and the block on which it stands, Twentieth to
Twenty-first streets, Ninth and Tenth avenues, is still called Chelsea
Square. Clement C. Moore inherited from his father, Bishop Benjamin
Moore, a large tract of land along the river near the present Chelsea
Square, and gave the land on which the seminary was built to that
institution. He himself lived in a house which his father had occupied
before him and which stood on the line of the present Twenty-third
Street on the block between Ninth and Tenth avenues. It was a very old
building, renowned for the fact that General Washington had stopped
there one afternoon when he had his headquarters in the city. Clement
C. Moore was a professor in the General Theological Seminary, and
while there compiled the first Greek and Hebrew lexicons ever
published in this country. But it is not by reason of his learned
books or his philanthropy that his name is best recalled, but by a
poem which he wrote for his children and of which the world at large
might never have known but that it was sent without his knowledge and
published in an up-State paper. This poem, the Christmas classic of
_The Visit of St. Nicholas_, begins with "'T was the night before
Christmas," and its simple yet merry jingle and delightful
word-pictures have endeared it to all children since his time and will
endure to please many more to come.
All that there was of literary New York half a century ago centred
about Anne C. Lynch. She established a circle, a gathering which
increased or fell off in numbers as men and women of brains came and
went. This was the first near approach to a _salon_ in this country.
In the early days of her coming to the city, Miss Lynch lived in a
neat-appearing brick house in Waverly Place, just off Washington
Square. She moved elsewhere from time to time, the literary coterie
moving about as she moved. At the height of her success, in 1855, she
married the Italian educator, Vincenzo Botta, then in his second year
in New York and occupying a professorship of Italian literature in the
University of New York. The receptions of Mrs. Botta flourished and
were as popular as had been those of Miss Lynch. Her writings, too,
went on, and her most widely known work, the material for which she
gathered during her intimate personal association with many authors,
the _Handbook of Universal Literature_, was written when she lived in
Thirty-seventh Street, a few doors west of Fifth Avenue.
In the early years of Anne C. Lynch's receptions, one of her intimates
was Caroline M. Kirkland, the friend of Bayard Taylor. Mrs. Kirkland,
who had just returned after a residence in Michigan, sought her advice
before she published _Forest Life_, which was the second of her
descriptions of the sparsely settled region where she had spent three
years of her life. The intimacy between these two continued for years,
indeed until Mrs. Kirkland died, in 1864, stricken with paralysis
while under the strain of managing a great sanitary fair during the
Civil War.
Through Mrs. Kirkland, Lydia M. Child was introduced at the Lynch
receptions, when she was associated with her husband in conducting the
_National Anti-Slavery Standard_. She had been a writer since her
youth, having published her first book, _Hobomok_, in 1821. Her works
had been much read, but lost much of their popularity after she
published the first anti-slavery book in America, in 1833, under the
title _An Appeal for that Class of Americans Called Africans_. She
ever remained prominent as an abolitionist, but because of her
opinions lost caste as a writer of novels. But Miss Lynch cared little
what opinions any one held so long as they really had opinions and
would stand by them, and Mrs. Child was welcomed to her home until she
left the city, in 1844, to spend the rest of her life in Wayland,
Massachusetts.
Very often Edgar Allan Poe attended the Lynch receptions, taking with
him his delicate wife, who seemed to get better for the moment when
she saw her husband the centre of a notable gathering. For even here
Poe had quite a following of his own. It was on one of these evenings
that he gave it as his opinion that _The Sinless Child_ was one of the
strongest long poems ever produced in America. This poem was just
then making a great stir and on this special evening had been the
subject of much discussion. The author was present, as she usually was
where writers congregated, for the beautiful and witty Elizabeth Oakes
Smith carried enthusiasm and inspiration wherever she went. She found
time to form part of many a circle, even though her days were well
filled, for she assisted her husband, "Major Jack Downing," in his
editorial work. For many a year before she finally retired to
Hollywood, South Carolina, she held her place as the first and only
woman lecturer in America.
[Illustration:
1. W.D. HOWELLS.
2. J.G. HOLLAND.
3. RICHARD GRANT WHITE.
4. BRANDER MATTHEWS.
5. WILLIAM WINTER.
From an engraving of the picture by J.H. Marble; courtesy of Mr. W.E.
Benjamin.]
Another dear friend of Poe's might usually be found at these
receptions. "Estella" Lewis, the poet, lived in Brooklyn and held
there quite a court of clever people. The time came when she was,
indeed, a friend in need to Poe in his time of dire necessity at
Fordham. It was at her Brooklyn home that he read _The Raven_ before
it was published, and Estella Lewis was the last friend he visited
before he left New York on the journey south which ended in his death.
On the "Poe nights," too, Ann S. Stephens was usually to be found at
Miss Lynch's. She became a much-read novelist, writing _Fashion and
Famine_ and _Mary Derwent_. On these nights, too, might be seen
Margaret Fuller, the transcendentalist. She had left her Massachusetts
home to take her place with Horace Greeley as literary editor of the
_Tribune_, and between whiles devoted herself to charitable work in an
effort to better the social condition of the poor of the metropolis.
During most of her stay she lived in a locality much changed since her
time, near where Forty-ninth Street touches the East River. A
picturesque spot it was, overlooking the green stretches of
Blackwell's Island, in the midst of suburban life. Her stay in New
York was short. After a year or so she went to Europe and in Italy
married the Marquis Ossoli. She was on her way back to America, in
1850, a passenger in the merchantman _Elizabeth_, when the ship was
wrecked off Fire Island and she perished with it.
To this group of writers also belongs Frances Sargent Osgood. While,
somewhere about the year 1846, the country was ringing with her
praise, she was living the secluded life of an invalid, with her
husband, in what was then becoming a fashionable neighborhood, 18 East
Fourteenth Street. Once, in 1845, she had met Poe, had been instantly
attracted by him, and became thereafter his staunch admirer,
expressing her opinion persistently whenever opportunity offered. He,
on his part, appreciated her poetic genius, and more than once
referred to the scrupulous taste, faultless style, and magical grace
of her verse. And several of his poems are addressed directly to her.
There was a young man named Richard Henry Stoddard who frequented the
Lynch receptions. He had worked for six years in a foundry learning
the trade of iron moulder, and writing poetry as he worked. By the
year 1848 he was beginning to make a name for himself, and his first
volume of poems, _Footnotes_, had just been published. At Miss Lynch's
house he met Miss Elizabeth Barstow, herself a poet, and some time
later visited her at her home in Mattapoisett. This led to their
marriage. Early in the year of his meeting with Miss Barstow, Stoddard
made the acquaintance of Bayard Taylor. Taylor had already travelled
on foot over Europe, had crystallized the results of these travels in
_Views Afoot_, and was then working under Greeley on the _Tribune_, as
one of the several editors. Side by side with him worked that
pure-hearted and thoughtful man who had been the instigator and
supporter of the Brook Farm experiment, George Ripley, who wrote the
_Tribune's_ book criticisms.
_Views Afoot_ was the most popular book of the day when Stoddard
walked into the _Tribune_ office and introduced himself to the author,
finding him very hard at work in a little pen of a room. This was the
start of a friendship which lasted for thirty years, and was only
broken in upon by death.
A few days after, Stoddard called upon Taylor, who then lived in
Murray Street, a few steps from Broadway. Charles Fenno Hoffman, who
occupied rooms in the same building, was then beginning to show signs
of the mental breakdown which was to cloud the last thirty-four years
of his life. But Hoffman was prosperous and occupied luxurious
quarters on the ground floor, while Taylor, despite the popularity of
his book, led a life of hard work and struggle. He was ill paid for
his services on the _Tribune_, as Greeley did not believe in high
salaries, and he lived up four flights of stairs in a sort of
two-roomed attic. There Stoddard went almost every Saturday after his
labors at the iron foundry, and there the friendship strengthened week
by week; there Taylor taught Stoddard to smoke; there they discussed
books and writers, and there wrote poetry together. There Taylor wrote
_Kubleh_ and _Ariel in the Cloven Pine_, and, too, the song that won
for him a prize when Barnum invited the entire country to a
competition in writing a song for Jenny Lind. Taylor was visited by a
great many friends, and with them the youthful Stoddard became
acquainted. Sometimes to the house in Murray Street came Rufus W.
Griswold, author of _Poets and Poetry of America_, _Prose Writers of
America_, and kindred works. He had been one of Taylor's early
advisers. The diplomatist and playwright, George H. Boker, often made
one of the party at this time, when his tragedy, _Calaynos_, was being
acted with great success at Sadlers's Wells Theatre in England.
Another visitor was Richard Kimball, the lawyer-author, then
enthusiastically putting the finishing touches to _St. Leger_.
These days of changing fortunes were the most romantic of Taylor's
career. Many other places in the city are associated with him, one a
house near Washington Square, where he lived for some years and wrote
among other things the _Poems of the Orient_. His last city home was
at 142 East Eighteenth Street. There he wrote _Deukalion_, and from
there he started out, after being dined and feted, on his mission as
United States Minister to Germany. In England he met Carlyle. In Paris
he had a "queer midnight supper" with Victor Hugo. In Germany, though
he was then quite an ill man, he threw himself into official business
with an energy that his constitution, worn by years of persistent hard
work, would not warrant. Before the end of the year, the friends in
America who had wished him farewell in April, congratulating him that
he had attained an honor that he prized, knew that he lay dead in
Berlin.