CAMBRIDGE
I gave up my studio in New York and went to Boston, and, my
commissions executed, moved from there to Cambridge, where I made my
home, returning thenceforward to the Adirondacks in the late summer
and autumn of every year while I remained in America. The following
springtime I spent making studies in that classic neighborhood,
especially in a favorite haunt of Lowell's,--the "Waverley Oaks,"--a
curious group of large white oaks, which had taken root some hundreds
of years ago on the foot of a moraine of one of the offsets of the
great glacier which, countless thousands of years ago, had covered New
England. They were beautiful trees and greatly beloved by Lowell, for
whom I painted the principal group, with Beaver Brook, another of his
favorite studies, and he lying by its bank in the foreground, a little
full-length portrait, not the length of my finger. I painted also a
similar portrait of Longfellow, under the most beautiful of the oaks,
on an eight-by-ten-inch canvas. It was a good portrait, but Lowell
deterred me from finishing it as I wished, saying that if I touched it
again I should destroy the likeness. I am half inclined to think that
his insistence was mainly intended to abbreviate the martyrdom
of Longfellow, whom I conducted every day to the Oaks, to insure
pre-Raphaelite fidelity, making him sit on a huge boulder under the
tree and even forgetting to carry a cushion for him, so that he sat on
the bare stone until at last the discomfort was evident to me, when
I folded my coat to cushion his stone seat. So kindly was his nature
that he had submitted to the inconvenience with the docility and
delicacy of a child, without a sign of impatience.
This absolute unselfishness and extreme consideration for others was
characteristic of the man. I saw much of him in the years following,
and found in him the most exquisitely refined and gentle nature I have
ever known,--one to which a brutal or inconsiderate act was positive
pain, and any aggression on the least creature, cause of intense
indignation. My recollection of his condescension to my demands on
his time and physical comfort remain in my memory as the highest
expression of his social beneficence. Longfellow was not expansive,
nor do I remember his ever becoming enthusiastic over anything or
anybody. One who knew nothing of his domestic life might have fancied
that he was cold, and certainly he did not possess that social
magnetism which made Lowell the loadstone of so many hearts, and made
the exercise of that attraction necessary to his own enjoyment of
existence. Longfellow adored his wife and children; but beyond that
circle, it seemed to me, he had no imperious longing to know or be
known. He had likes and dislikes; but so far as I understood him, no
strong antipathies or ardent friendships. He had warm friendships for
Lowell, the Nortons, and Agassiz, for example, but I think he had but
a mild regard for Emerson, and I remember his saying one day that
Emerson used his friends like lemons,--squeezing them till they were
dry, and then throwing them away. This showed that he misunderstood
Emerson, but perhaps intelligibly, for Longfellow had few of those
qualities which interested Emerson, and there could not have been
much in common to both. Emerson liked men who gave him problems to
solve,--something to learn,--while Longfellow was transparent, limpid
as a clear spring reflecting the sky and showing all that was in its
depths; and to Emerson he offered no problem. I never saw him angry
but once, and that was at his next-door neighbor shooting at a robin
in a cherry-tree that stood near the boundary between the two gardens.
The small shot carried over and rattled about us where we sat on the
verandah of the old Washington house, but showed the avicidal intent,
and Longfellow went off at once to protest against the barbarity, not
at all indignant at the personal danger, if he thought of any.
His adoration of his wife was fully justified, for rarely have I seen
a woman in whom a Juno-like dignity and serenity were so wedded to
personal beauty and to the fine culture of brain and heart, which
commanded reverence from the most ordinary acquaintance, as in her. No
one who had seen her at home could ever forget the splendid vision,
and the last time I ever saw her, so far as I remember, was in summer
time, when she and her two daughters, all in white muslin, like
creatures of another world, evanescent, translucent, stood in the
doorway to say good-by to me. In the same costume, a little later, she
met death. She was making impressions in sealing-wax, to amuse her
daughters, when a flaming drop fell on the inflammable stuff, and in
an instant she was in flames, burned to death before help could come.
It was then that they found that Longfellow was not the cold man they
had generally believed him. He never recovered from the bereavement,
and shortly after he became a Spiritualist, and, until he in his glad
turn passed the gates of death, he lived in what he knew to be the
light of her presence. And certainly if such a thing as communion
across that grim threshold can be, this was the occasion which made it
possible. There was something angelic about them both, even in this
life,--a natural innocence and large beneficence and equanimity which,
in the chance and contradiction of life, could rarely be found in
wedded state.
One of the most notable personages of that little world, whom I knew
in connection with Longfellow, was his brother-in-law,--Thomas G.
Appleton,--a most distinguished amateur of art; a subtle, if sometimes
vagarious, critic, poet, and thinker: the wit to whom most of the
clever things said in Boston came naturally in time to be attributed.
The famous saying that "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris,"
is generally supposed to be his, though Oliver Wendell Holmes told me
one day that he himself was really the author of it; but, if a keen
witticism was floating about fatherless in the Boston circles it
drifted to Tom Appleton as putative parent. His, too, was a kindly
nature, and many a rising artist found his way to a larger recognition
by Appleton's unobtrusive aid. He, like Longfellow, was a sincere
Spiritualist. One of the most remarkable of this group of men was
Professor Peirce, mathematician, of whose flights into the higher
regions of the science of numbers and quantities many interesting
things were told. He had written a book to show, if I remember right
after so many years, that the square root of minus one was a right
angle
__
(\/-1=90°),
which was said to have been read only by a mathematician who presided
over an observatory in the Ural Mountains. He had an extraordinary
power of making his abstruse results clear to the ordinary intellect,
and was in various directions a brilliant conversationalist. One day,
going into Boston in the omnibus with him, I questioned him as to the
famous problem. To my astonishment he went through a demonstration
adapted to my intelligence which made me understand the nature of
the substitution and the solution before our half hour's transit was
ended. I did not understand the mathematical statement, but he put it
in common-sense terms, which I apprehended perfectly, though I never
could repeat them.
My Adirondack experiences and studies having excited the desire on the
part of several Cambridge friends to visit the Wilderness, I made up
a party which comprised Lowell and his two nephews, Charles and James
Lowell (two splendid young New Englanders afterwards killed during the
Civil War), Dr. Estes Howe, Lowell's brother-in-law, and John Holmes,
the brother of Oliver Wendell, considered by many of the Cambridge set
the wittier and wiser of the two, but who, being extremely averse to
publicity, was never known in literature. We made a flying journey of
inspection through the Saranac Lakes and down the Raquette River
to Tupper's Lake, and then across a wild and at that day a little
explored section to the head of Raquette Lake, and down the Raquette
River back to the Saranacs; the party returning home and I back to the
headwaters of the Raquette to spend the summer painting. I built a
camp on a secluded bay, which still bears my name amongst the men of
the section, and there I worked in a solitude sometimes complete and
sometimes shared by my guide, who passed his time between the camp and
the settlement at Saranac, whence I drew all my supplies beyond those
which the lake and the forest furnished us with. The solitude of the
Wilderness at that time can be no longer found anywhere in the vast
woodland which, much mutilated and scarred by fires and clearings,
still covers the district between the springs of the Mohawk and the
rivers which empty into the St. Lawrence. There was one settler on the
lake, from whom I could, when necessary, get a loaf of bread, but
the solitude for nine days out of ten was not broken by a strange
footfall. My camp was a shelter of bark, raised on poles, open in
front to the morning sun, just sufficing to shed the rain, while my
bed was a layer of the branches of the fir-trees that grew around.
Trout from the lake, broiled on the coals of the camp-fire, with a
piece of bread, was the usual and sufficient fare, though we now and
then killed a deer when Steve, my guide, was with me; at other times
the dog was my only company, and in this monotonous life I found the
most complete content that my experience has given me. Here wolves
abounded, but only on one occasion did they attempt to disturb me,
which was when I had left by the lake shore a deer we had killed in
the morning, and they came at night to steal the meat. Bears were
abundant, but even shyer than the wolves; and though we heard, now and
then, the cry of a panther (puma), we never saw one.
Here the morbid passion of solitude grew on me. The serene silence was
seldom broken save by the cry of an eagle or an osprey, high overhead,
the chirping of the chickadee flitting about the camp to find a crumb,
or the complaining note of the Canada jay, most friendly of all wild
birds, seeking for the scraps of venison we used to throw out for him.
No other birds came to us, and one of the most striking features
in the Wilderness was the paucity of bird life and voice. As I
sat painting, I would see the gray eagle come down, with his long
cycloidal swoop, skimming along the surface of the water, and catch,
as he passed, the trout that sunned itself on the surface; or the
osprey seizing it with his direct plunge into the lake, from which,
after a struggle that lasted sometimes a minute, the only sign of his
presence being the agitated water, he would emerge with the fish in
his claws and sail aloft, hurrying to escape to the forest with his
prey lest the eagle, always watching from the upper air, should rob
him of his hard-earned booty. Once I saw the eagle make the mighty
plunge from far above, the frightened osprey dropping the fish to
escape the shock, and the eagle catching it in midair as it fell.
The little incidents of woodland life took the place of all other
diversions and left no hour void of interest. I broke up the camp only
when the autumn was so far advanced that it was uncomfortable to
live in the open air. It is difficult for one who has not had the
experience to understand the fascination of this absolute solitude, or
the impressiveness of the silence, unbroken sometimes through whole
days. I had absolutely no desire for human society, and I broke camp
with reluctance, to return to my studio at Cambridge.
The next summer the party was formed which led to the foundation of
the Adirondack Club, and the excursion it made is commemorated by
Emerson in his poem "The Adirondacs." The company included Emerson,
Agassiz, Dr. Howe, Professor Jeffries Wyman, John Holmes,--who
became as fond as I was of this wild life,--Judge Hoar (later
Attorney-General in the cabinet of President Grant), Horatio Woodman,
Dr. Binney, and myself. Of this company, as I write, I am the only
survivor. I did my best to enroll Longfellow in the party, but, though
he was for a moment hesitating, I think the fact that Emerson was
going with a gun settled him in the determination to decline. "Is it
true that Emerson is going to take a gun?" he asked me; and when
I said that he had finally decided to do so, he ejaculated, "Then
somebody will be shot!" and would talk no more of going.
Perhaps the final reason, or that which would in any case have
indisposed him to join the company, was his want of sympathy with
Emerson. Emerson and he were in fact of antagonistic intellectuality,
both in the quality of the exquisite courtesy which distinguished them
equally, and in the fibre of intellectual working and the quality of
mental activity. Longfellow was of the most refined social culture,
disciplined to self-control under all circumstances and difficulties;
sensitive in the highest degree to the forms of courtesy, and
incapable by nature as by training of an act or word which could
offend the sensibilities of even a discourteous interlocutor,--capable
at worst of an indignant silence, but incapable of invading the
personality of another; not serene, but of an invincible tranquillity;
with no sympathy for mystery or obscurity; supremely above the general
and commonplace by the exquisite refinement to which he carried the
expression of what the general and commonplace world felt and thought;
remote from roughness in the form or the substance of his thought; in
short, the _ne plus ultra_ of refinement as man and poet. Emerson was
too serene ever to be discourteous, and was capable of the hottest
antagonism without rudeness, and the most intense indignation without
quickening his speech or raising his tone; grasping and exhausting
with imaginative activity whatever object furnished him with
matter for thought, and throwing to the rubbish heap whatever was
superficial; indifferent to form or polish if only he could find a
diamond; reveling in mystery, and with eyes that penetrated like the
X-ray through all obscurities, and found at the bottom of them what
there was to find; arrested by no surfaces, inflexible in his
devotion to truth, and indifferent to all personalities or artificial
conditions of men or things. Nothing but the roots of things, their
inmost anatomy, attracted him; he brushed away contemptuously the
beauties on which Longfellow spent the tenderness of his character,
and threw aside like an empty nutshell the form to which an artist
might have given the devotion of his best art, for the art's sake.
In his temper there was no patience with shams, little toleration
of forms. It would, I should think, be clear to one who was well
acquainted with both men, that there was little in common between them
beyond culture, but I never heard Emerson speak of Longfellow, and can
only judge by induction that he never occupied himself much with him.
We tried also to get Dr. Holmes to join us; but the Doctor was devoted
to Boston, and could not have lived long out of its atmosphere, and
with the woods and savagery he had no sympathy. He loved his Cambridge
friends serenely, Lowell, Agassiz, and Wyman, I think, above others;
but he enjoyed himself most of all, and Boston more than any other
thing on earth. He was lifted above ennui and discontent by a most
happy satisfaction with the rounded world of his own individuality and
belongings. Of the three men whom I have personally known in the
world who seemed most satisfied with what fate and fortune had made
them,--viz., Gladstone, Professor Freeman, and Holmes,--I think Holmes
enjoyed himself the most. There was a tinge of dandyism in the Doctor;
not enough to be considered a weakness, but enough to show that he
enjoyed his personal appearance and was content with what he had
become, and this in so delightful a way that one accepted him at once
at his own terms. The Doctor stood for Boston as Lowell for Cambridge,
the archetype of the Hub. Nobody represented it as he did. Tom
Appleton was nearest him, but Tom loved Paris better, and was a
"globe-trotter," as often in Europe as in Massachusetts, while the
Doctor hardly left the Hub even for a vacation; there was nothing
beyond it that was of great import to him. He was the sublimation of
Yankee wit as Lowell was of Yankee humor and human nature, and he
made of witticism a study; polished, refined, and prepared his "_bons
mots_", and, at the best moment, led the conversation round to the
point at which it was opportune to fire them off. He had a large
medical knowledge of human nature and intellectual pathology, but I
could never realize that he was a physician; I should not have trusted
myself to his doctoring. As with Longfellow, his family affections
were absorbing, and his love for his son, the present Mr. Justice
Holmes, and his pride in him, were very pleasant to see, and they ran
on the surface of his nature like his love for Boston; but I could
never feel that his feeling for his outside friends was more than a
mild, sunny glow of kindliness and vivid intellectual sympathy. Of
course I judge him from a difficult standard, that of the Cambridge
circle, in which the personal relations were very warm, and especially
comparing him with Lowell and the Nortons, with whom friendship was a
religion.
Holmes and Lowell were the antitheses of the New England intellect,
and this more in their personality than in their writing. If Lowell
could have acquired Holmes's respect for his work, he would have left
a larger image in the American Walhalla; but he never gave care to the
perfection of what he wrote, for his mind so teemed with material that
the time to polish and review never came. Holmes, like a true artist,
loved the _limae labor_. He was satisfied, it seemed to me, to do the
work of one lifetime and then rest, while Lowell looked forward to a
succession of lifetimes all full of work, and one can hardly conceive
him as ever resting or caring to stop work. Lowell's was a generous,
widely sympathizing nature, from which radiated love for humanity, and
the broadest and most catholic helpfulness for every one who asked
for his help, with a special fund for his friends. Holmes drew a line
around him, within which he shone like a winter sun, and outside of
which his care did not extend. The one was best in what he did, the
other in what he was. Holmes always seemed to me cynical to the
general world; Lowell to have embodied the antique sentiment, "I am a
man, and hold nothing human as indifferent to me." Both were adored
by those around them, and the adoration kindled Holmes to a warmer
reflection to the adorers; Lowell felt it as the earth feels sunshine,
which sinks into the fertile soil and bears its fruit in a richer
harvest.
Excepting Holmes, Norton, and Longfellow, our company included most of
what was most distinct in the world in which we lived, with some who
were eminent only in their social relations, and who neither cared
to be nor ever became of interest to the general world. The care of
arranging the details of the excursion was left to me, and I had,
therefore, to precede the company to the Wilderness, and so missed
what must have been to the others a very amusing experience. The rumor
of the advent of the party spread through the country around Saranac,
and at the frontier town where they would begin the journey into the
woods the whole community was on the _qui vive_ to see, not Emerson or
Lowell, of whom they knew nothing, but Agassiz, who had become famous
in the commonplace world through having refused, not long before, an
offer from the Emperor of the French of the keepership of the Jardin
des Plantes and a senatorship, if he would come to Paris and live.
Such an incredible and disinterested love for America and science in
our hemisphere had lifted Agassiz into an elevation of popularity
which was beyond all scientific or political dignity, and the
selectmen of the town appointed a deputation to welcome Agassiz and
his friends to the region. A reception was accorded, and they came,
having taken care to provide themselves with an engraved portrait
of the scientist, to guard against a personation and waste of their
respects. The head of the deputation, after having carefully compared
Agassiz to the engraving, turned gravely to his followers and said,
"Yes, it's him;" and they proceeded with the same gravity to shake
hands in their order, ignoring all the other luminaries.
I had in the mean time been into the Wilderness and selected a site
for the camp on one of the most secluded lakes, out of the line of
travel of the hunters and fisherfolk,--a deep _cul de sac_ of lake on
a stream that led nowhere, known as Follansbee Pond. There, with
my guide, I built a bark camp, prepared a landing-place, and then
returned to Saranac in time to meet the arriving guests. I was
unfortunately prevented from accompanying them up the lakes the next
morning, because a boat I had been building for the occasion was not
ready for the water, and so I missed what was to me of the greatest
interest,--the first impressions of Emerson of the Wilderness,
absolute nature. I joined them at night of the first day's journey, in
a rainstorm such as our summer rarely gives in the mountains, and
we made the unique and fascinating journey down the Raquette River
together; Agassiz taking his place in my boat, each other member of
the party having his own guide and boat.
The scene, like the company, exists no longer. There is a river which
still flows where the other flowed; but, like the water that has
passed its rapids, and the guests that have gone the way of all
those who have lived, it is something different. Then it was a deep,
mysterious stream, meandering through unbroken forests, walled up on
either side in green shade, the trees of centuries leaning over to
welcome and shelter the voyager, flowing silently in great sweeps of
dark water, with, at long intervals, a lagoon setting back into the
wider forest around, enameled with pond lilies and sagittaria, and the
refuge of undisturbed waterfowl and browsing deer. Our lake lay at the
head of such a lagoon, a devious outlet of the basin of which the
lake occupied the principal expanse, reached through three miles of
no-man's route, framed in green hills forest-clad up to their summits.
The camp was a shelter of spruce bark, open wide in front and closed
at the ends, drawn on three faces of an octohedron facing the
fireplace. The beds were made of layers of spruce and other fir
branches spread on the ground and covered with the fragrant twigs of
the arbor vitae. Two huge maples overhung the camp, and at a distance
of twenty feet from our lodge we entered the trackless, primeval
forest. The hills around furnished us with venison, and the lake with
trout, and there we passed the weeks of the summer heats. We were ten,
with eight guides, and while we were camping there we received the
news that the first Atlantic cable was laid, and the first message
sent under the sea from one hemisphere to the other,--an event which
Emerson did not forget to record in noble lines.