assumed the truth of evolution in nature. More and more this idea
became fruitful to him. His friend Agassiz, on the appearance of "The
Vestiges of Creation," had committed himself warmly against it, but
Emerson felt certain that the future of science belonged to that
principle, which he had reached by his poetic intuition. Nearly thirty
years ago, when I was a member of Divinity College, the theology
taught was still a slightly rationalistic Unitarianism and the science
qualified by it (though Agassiz would not admit miracle). Some of the
students were finding their real professor in Concord. On one evening
we went out, travelling the seventeen miles in sleighs, to hear a
lecture that was to have been given by him; it had been unavoidably
postponed, but Emerson, hearing of our arrival, invited us to his
house, and we had no reason to feel any disappointment. Nevertheless,
Emerson wrote me that if I would make the preparations he would read
an essay in my room. On that occasion Emerson read a paper on
"Poetry," in which he stated fully and clearly the doctrine of
evolution. This was five years before the appearance of the papers of
Darwin and Wallace in the journal of the Linnaean Society (1858),
though I find in Emerson's essay as published ("Letters and Social
Aims," Chatto & Windus, 1876) that Darwin is mentioned; otherwise that
essay is precisely the same that was read to us in 1853. I well
remember how we were startled that afternoon by Emerson's emphatic
declaration--"There is one animal, one plant, one matter, and one
force." He said also: "Science does not know its debt to imagination.
Goethe did not believe that a great naturalist could exist without
this faculty. He was himself conscious of that help, which made him a
prophet among doctors. From this vision he gave grave hints to the
geologist, the botanist, and the optician." The name of Emerson would
now be set beside that of Goethe by every man of science in America.
While as yet "The Vestiges of Creation" was trampled on by preachers
and professors, Emerson affirmed its principle to be true, and during
some years, in which no recognized man of science ventured to accept
Darwin's hypothesis, he sustained its claim by references to the
scientific authorities of Europe. For the rest, this essay, read to us
at Divinity College, did for some who heard it very much the same that
the generalization of Darwin has done for vast numbers of minds. The
harmony of nature and thought was in it, clouds floated into light,
and though poets were present, it appeared the truest New World poem
that we were gathered there around the seer in whose vision the
central identity in nature flowed through man's reason, gently did
away with discords through their promise of larger harmonies. That
which the Brahmans found in the far East, our little company there in
the West knew also--"From the poisonous tree of the world two species
of fruit are produced, sweet as the waters of life: Love, or the
society of beautiful souls, and Poetry, whose taste is like the
immortal juice Vishnu." When Emerson had finished there was a hush of
silence, the usual applause of his listeners; it seemed hardly broken
when Otto Dresel performed some "songs without words."
Emerson was the first man of high social position in America who
openly took the anti-slavery position. On May 29, 1831, he admitted an
abolitionist to lecture on the subject in his church, six years before
even Channing had committed himself to that side. Garrison was at that
time regarded as a vulgar street-preacher of notions too wild to
excite more than a smile. The despised group on Boston Common was
first sheltered by Emerson, and this action was more significant
because Emerson was chaplain of the Massachusetts Legislature. Emerson
first drew the sympathy of scholars to that side. The voices of the
two popular orators, Channing and Phillips, soon followed, and
Longfellow began to write the anti-slavery poems collected in 1842.
Emerson could not throw himself into any organization, nor did he
encourage the scholars around him to do so; he believed that to
elevate character, to raise the ethical standard, to inspire courage
in the intellect of the country, would speedily make its atmosphere
too pure for a slave to breathe. Fearless in vindicating those whose
convictions led them to enlist for this particular struggle, Emerson
saw in slavery one among many symptoms of the moral disease of the
time. "The timidity of our public opinion," he said, "is our disease;
or, shall I say, the absence of private opinion. Good nature is
plentiful, but we want justice with heart of steel to fight down the
proud. The private mind has the access to the totality of goodness and
truth, that it may be a balance to a corrupt society; and to stand for
the private verdict against popular clamor is the office of the noble.
If a humane measure is propounded in behalf of the slave, or of the
Irishman, or the Catholic, or for the succor of the poor, that
sentiment, that project, will have the homage of the hero. That is his
nobility, his oath of knighthood, to succor the helpless and
oppressed; always to throw himself on the side of weakness, of youth,
of hope, on the liberal, on the expansive side; never on the
conserving, the timorous, the lock-and-bolt system. More than our
good-will we may not be able to give. We have our own affairs, our own
genius, which chain us to our proper work. We cannot give our life to
the cause of the debtor, of the slave, or the pauper, as another is
doing; but to one thing we are bound, not to blaspheme the sentiment
and the work of that man, not to throw stumbling-blocks in the way of
the abolitionist, the philanthropist, as the organs of influence and
opinion are swift to do." Emerson had as much practical sagacity as
genius; when he spoke these words (in a lecture on "The Young
American," in Boston, 1844) he had reached a commanding position,
carrying with it gravest responsibilities; the destinies of hundreds
of young men and women were determined by his lectures. But with
reference to the anti-slavery movement, he did more than he exacted
from others, and recognized it as a far more important reform than
others When, in 1835, Harriet Martineau was nearly mobbed in Boston,
personal violence being threatened and no prominent citizen venturing
to her side, Emerson and his brother Charles hastened to her defence.
"At the time of the hubbub against me in Boston," she writes in her
autobiography, "Charles Emerson stood alone in a large company in
defence of the right of free thought and speech, and declared that he
had rather see Boston in ashes than that I, or anybody else, should be
debarred in any way from perfectly free speech. His brother Waldo
invited me to be his guest in the midst of my unpopularity."
In 1844, when Massachusetts citizen negroes had been taken to prison
from ships in southern ports, Emerson delivered an oration on the
anniversary of West Indian emancipation, and spoke sternly on the
matter. "If such a damnable outrage can be committed on the person of
a citizen with impunity, let the Governor break the broad seal of the
State; he bears the sword in vain. The Governor of Massachusetts is a
trifler, the State-House in Boston is a play-house; the General Court
is a dishonored body, if they make laws which they cannot execute. The
great-hearted Puritans have left no posterity." He demanded that the
representatives of the State should demand of Congress the instant
release, by force if necessary, of the imprisoned negro seamen, and
their indemnification. As for dangers to the Union from such
demands--"the Union is already at an end when the first citizen of
Massachusetts is thus outraged." This address was a bugle, and it
filled the anti-slavery ranks with fresh courage. The _Herald of
Freedom_, reporting it at the time, says their eyes were filled with
tears as this leader of New England literature came from his poetic
solitude to join hands with them.
The service which students and literary men could render in those days
was often the subject of anxious consultation, and Emerson never
failed to counsel sacrifices for the public duty.
"When the ship is in a storm," he used to say, "the passengers must
lend a hand, and even women tug at the ropes." When the Southern
States began to secede, some frightened compromisers in the North
hoped to soothe them by silencing the abolitionists; roughs were
employed to fill the anti-slavery halls and drown every voice.
Sometimes there was personal violence. During the war, in which many
of his friends were slain, and his only son wounded, no man did better
service than Emerson, with voice, pen, and means; and when it ended
his counsels were of the utmost importance.
Emerson had a happy old age, and lived to see his golden sheaves
around him. In the "Address" (1837), now historical, which brought the
fulminations of the Unitarian pulpit and university upon him, in his
thirty-fourth year, he admonished the American scholar that, "if the
single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there
abide, the huge world will come round to him." And now America has, in
his own history, the impressive confirmation of his faith. In just
twenty-nine years from the time that sentence was uttered, the
university which repudiated him made him an overseer and a doctor of
laws, and a lecturer to the students, and he was the most universally
beloved and honored man in America. Where he singly opened his church
to abolitionists, he lived to see all churches anti-slavery and the
slave set free. The white-robed sage lay in the church founded by his
Puritan ancestors, enlarged by his own thought, above whose pulpit was
a harp made of golden flowers, and on it an open book made of pinks,
pansies, roses, with the word "Finis." Flowers were never more truly
symbolical. His effective weapons against error and wrong were like
those roses with which the angels, in Goethe's "Faust," drove away the
demons, and his sceptre was made known by blossoming in his hand.
* * * * *
The following extract from a letter written by Emerson to one of his
children, is reprinted from Cabot's "A Memoir of R. W. Emerson," by
permission of the publisher, G. W. Dillingham.
"You are bound to be healthy and happy. I expect so much of you,
of course, and neither allow for nor believe any rumors to the
contrary. Please not to give the least countenance to any
hobgoblin of the sick sort, but live out-of-doors and in the
sea-bath and the sail-boat, and the saddle, and the wagon, and,
best of all, in your shoes, so soon as they will obey you for a
mile. For the great mother Nature will not quite tell her secret
to the coach or the steamboat, but says, 'One to one, my dear, is
my rule also, and I keep my enchantments and oracles for the
religious soul coming alone, or as good as alone, in true love.'"
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW[15]
[Footnote 15: Copyright, 1894, by Selmar Hess]
By HEZEKIAH BUTTERWORTH
(1807-1882)
[Illustration: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.]
That was a memorable scene in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey,
when the veil was lifted from the bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
the first American upon whom England had conferred such distinguished
honor. James Russell Lowell was there, and made the eulogy, and left
in all minds the impression of these simple words; "The most beautiful
character that I have ever known." Mr. Lowell knew men, and among the
great spirits of the age with whom he had been associated, he perhaps
had known no literary man more intimately than Longfellow. The
original families of Lowell and Longfellow in America had grown side
by side on the banks of the Merrimac. The younger poet had succeeded
the elder in the professorship of literature at Harvard College; the
two had lived side by side in historic houses in the old Cambridge
neighborhood on the Charles, and there had shared the amenities of
suburban life and had studied the world together. It was said that
Longfellow came to live in a house "on the way to Mt. Auburn;" Lowell
lived in a house on the same road, and the two poets sleep together
there now in the loving shadows of Boston's "Field of God."
Since the days of Horace, friendship has found no more sympathetic and
beautiful expression in verse than in the lines inscribed by Lowell to
Longfellow and in the poems written by Longfellow in reference to
Lowell.
Says Lowell in his lines to H. W. L----:
"Long days be his, and each as lusty-sweet
As gracious natures find his song to be;
May age steal on with softly-cadenced feet
Falling in music, as for him were meet
Whose choicest verse is harsher-toned than he!"
Says Longfellow of Lowell in the "Herons of Elmwood:"
"Sing to him, say to him, here at his gate,
Where the boughs of the stately elms are meeting,
Some one hath lingered to meditate,
And send him unseen this friendly greeting;
"That many another hath done the same,
Though not by a sound was the silence broken;
The surest pledge of a deathless name
Is the silent homage of thoughts unspoken."
The matchless lines in "The Two Angels," a poem that commemorates the
events of the birth of a child to Longfellow and the death of the
beautiful wife of Lowell on the same night, in which the poet sees an
angel with amaranths go to the door of his neighbor, while an angel
with asphodels comes to his own door, strikes the tenderest chords of
life.
Longfellow was the poet of friendship, and he carried his heart
friends wherever he went. The river Charles in his fancy made the
letter C in its windings in the Brighton meadows before his door, and
ever recalled three friends who had borne that name. One of the
masterpieces of the work of his fading years is "Three Friends of
Mine," in which he pictures Felton and Agassiz and the midnight
parting with Charles Sumner at his door, and represents himself as one
left to cover up the embers.
Henry W. Longfellow, the poet of "Hope, Home, and History," was a
descendant of the family of William Longfellow, who came from England
to Newbury, Mass., in 1675, and a son of Stephen Longfellow, an
eminent lawyer and public man. He was born in Portland, Me., February
27, 1807. The family consisted of eight children, of which he was the
second, and of which two were poets, the other being the Unitarian
hymn writer, Rev. Samuel Longfellow.
He grew up a pure, loving boy in the schools of Portland, Me., fond of
the woods, the hills, and the sea. "My Lost Youth" furnishes a
delightful picture of this period of his life. It is said that his
childhood fancy first found expression in the following rhymes:
"Mr. Finney had a turnip
That grew behind the barn,
And it grew and it grew,
But never did any _harm_."
A member of the Longfellow family has denied that these luminous but
not very promising lines were the first offering of his muse. If the
anecdote be apocryphal, the _boy_ Longfellow yet began to love poetry
and to write it, and he became a newspaper poet, one of those common
soldiers of literature, while a student. He read Irving at twelve, and
was charmed with the matter and style of "Rip Van Winkle." He felt the
charm of Horace a little later, and probably learned his first lesson
in eloquent literature from the "Poetic Art" of the Augustine age of
Rome in her glory. Says Horace: "He who writes what is useful with
what is agreeable wins every vote: his book crosses the sea; it will
enrich the booksellers, and win for him imperishable fame."
Longfellow learned to make what is _useful_, _agreeable_, and this
principle was one of the great secrets of his success in literary
life. His early poems that did useful and agreeable service in the
poet's corner of the newspapers of the time were, so far as we know,
never collected. A few of them, however, survive, among them "The
Spirit of Poetry," "Sunrise on the Hills," and "The Hymn of the
Moravian Nuns."
At the age of fourteen he was prepared for Bowdoin College, which he
entered a year later as a sophomore, and became a member of one of the
most distinguished classes in American history. Among his
fellow-students were Nathaniel Hawthorne, his personal friend, John S.
C. Abbott, George B. Cheever, William Pitt Fessenden, John P. Hale,
Calvin E. Stone, and Franklin Pierce, afterward President of the
United States. He was graduated the fourth in his class.
The ambition for authorship came to him among the shades of Bowdoin.
He said while there, thus anticipating in prose the "Psalm of Life:"
"Whatever I study I ought to engage in with all my soul, for I _will_
be eminent in something."
His poems published in the newspapers, principally in the _Boston
Literary Gazette_, during his college life made for him a name, and he
was offered the professorship of modern languages in Bowdoin College,
soon after his graduation. To better prepare himself for the chair he
went abroad, in 1826, in his twentieth year. He studied in France,
Spain, Italy, and Germany. He made himself master of the French,
Spanish, German, and Italian languages and literature, and returned to
America in the late summer of 1829, and entered upon the duties of his
professorship at Bowdoin in the autumn. He married Miss Mary Potter,
of Portland, Me., and went to live in an old house, which was shaded
by a single great elm, the site of which is still shown, on a salary
of $1,000 per year. He published "Outre Mer," and taught and wrote
with such distinguished success that, on the resignation of George
Ticknor, he was offered the chair of modern languages at Harvard. For
the larger preparation which he found necessary for his work, he went
to Europe again in 1835. In his first visit to Europe he had met
Washington Irving in Spain; he now made the acquaintance of Carlyle
and Browning. His wife died in Germany.
He became a professor in Harvard in the fall of 1836, making his
residence at the Cragie House, an old colonial mansion, shaded by
trees, which Washington had used for his headquarters in 1775-1776. He
married a most beautiful and accomplished lady, a daughter of Hon.
Nathan Appleton, of Boston, whom he had met abroad, and who is
supposed to be described in his romance "Hyperion." Here, happy in his
domestic life, surrounded by the most scholarly men of America, his
literary life ripened, his fame as a poet grew, and his sympathy with
life as expressed in his works won all hearts. His "Voices of the
Night" made him the poet of the home; "Evangeline," which is the
American book of Ruth, made him the singer of the fidelity of holy
affections, and "Hiawatha," the voice of the dying traditions of the
Indian race.
He was a lover of his family, and a great affliction came to him in
the summer of 1861. One July day his wife was playing with some
sealing-wax with her children, when her dress caught fire, and she was
enveloped in the flames, and burned to death. The poet is said to have
suddenly changed from a young man to an old man under his weight of
grief; he appeared in the streets of Cambridge again, in a few weeks,
but unlike his former self. His affection for his dead wife in his
widowerhood is expressed in the "Cross of Snow," written many years
after her death:
"In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face--the face of one long dead--
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died."
He would take a dear friend into the room where her portrait hung,
point to it, and say "my dear wife," and turn away to weep. His loving
dream of his first wife is pictured in "The Footsteps of Angels:"
"And with them the Being Beauteous,
Who unto my youth was given,
More than all things else to love me,
And is now a saint in heaven.
"With a slow and noiseless footstep
Comes that messenger divine,
Takes the vacant chair beside me,
Lays her gentle hand in mine.
"And she sits and gazes at me
With those deep and tender eyes.
Like the stars, so still and saint-like.
Looking downward from the skies.
"Uttered not, yet comprehended,
Is the spirit's voiceless prayer.
Soft rebukes, in blessings ended.
Breathing from her lips of air.
"Oh, though oft depressed and lonely
All my fears are laid aside,
If I but remember only
Such as these have lived and died."
In 1868 he went to England with his family. His fame in England was as
great now as that of any English poet. He was received in London with
the greatest love and hospitality; he met the queen, and received a
doctor's degree from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. His
reception by the literary classes was not more warm than the
appreciative interest which was shown by the people. He had become
the poet of the English homes, and was as greatly read as the
Laureate.
I met the poet under most pleasant circumstances, in the beginning of
his beautiful old age. I was a young editor; I was called to make an
address before a church literary society on the historic places of
Boston, and I wrote to Professor Longfellow in regard to the history
of the poem "I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight." I received a note
from him in his well-known hand, saying that if I would visit him some
evening at his home, it would give him pleasure not only to give me
the history of the writing of this poem, but of any of his poems in
which I might take an interest. I accepted the invitation, and one
misty February night found me at his door, feeling as poor Phillis
Wheatly must have felt when she stood at the same door after the
invitation from Washington.
I well recall the night. The slow opening of the door by the quiet
servant, the dim hall that seemed haunted by the shadows of the past,
the great reception-room walled with books and pictures!
The poet was alone--he was a lonely man in his old age. He rose from
his table, and came to meet me, a kindly light in his face, his
flowing hair as white as snow. He saw that I was awed by his presence,
and his gracious dignity changed at once into a friendly sympathy. "I
have here some things that may interest you," he said; "here is
Coleridge's inkstand; there is Tom Moore's waste-paper basket; and
there," he added, in a reverent tone, "is a piece of Dante's coffin."
The last relic was enclosed in a solid glass, and he proceeded to tell
the story of how he had received it.
"You express a kindly interest in the origin of my poems," he added,
in substance. "I will tell you something about the writing of some of
them. You see the screen yonder; it is Japanese; there is written upon
it the 'Psalm of Life.' The poem was written at Cambridge when the
orchards were bright with buds and blossoms, and the days were in the
full tide of the year. I did not write it for publication but for
myself. I felt an inspiration to express in words my one purpose in
life. I carried it about with me for a long time, when I was asked for
a poem for the _Knickerbocker Magazine_, then a popular periodical,
and I sent it to the editor without any expectation of its success
with the people. It has been translated into nearly all languages that
have a literature.
"In London I received an invitation to visit the queen. On returning
from the palace, the coach was stopped by the crowd of vehicles in the
street. There stepped before the door of the carriage an English
workman. 'Are you Mr. Longfellow?' he asked. 'I am,' I answered. 'Did
you write the "Psalm of Life"?' 'I wrote that poem, my friend.'
'Pardon me, but would you be willing to take the hand of a
_workingman_?' 'Certainly, my friend; it would give me pleasure.' He
put his hand through the carriage window, and I shook hands with him.
That," said Mr. Longfellow, with emphasis and feeling, "was the best
compliment that I ever received in my life."
[Illustration: Longfellow's Study.]
The last declaration, in which we think that we have quoted the poet's
exact words, shows the heart and character of the man. It is a
photograph of his soul.
He said that the poem "I Stood on the Bridge at Midnight" was written in
the lonely hours of his widowerhood, when he used to visit Boston
evenings and return over the bridge of the Charles. The bridge grew
still as the night wore on, and the procession of the day became thin.
There was a furnace at Brighton at that time, and the reflection of the
red fire fell across the dark river. The bridge over the Charles is
nearly the same now as then; it has been somewhat reconstructed, but the
wooden piers are there; the drifting seaweed, the odor of the brine, and
the processions of "care-encumbered men" vanishing into the night. An
English nobleman who is a literary critic has pronounced this poem the
most sympathetic in the language. Its popularity probably is due to the
night scene and the spirit of self-renunciation. It is one of the most
beautiful songs of the age as set to music by two English composers. We
never tire of the message of sympathy.