New England in Letters E-Book

Rufus Rockwell Wilson

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 383

Beschreibung

Mr . Wilson, who is widely and favorably known through his " Rambles in Colonial Byways" and similar works , describes a series of pilgrimages to all the noteworthy literary landmarks of the New England States . These carry the reader to the birthplace of Longfellow and the scenes sung by Whittier, to the Salem of Hawthorne, to the Concord of Emerson and Thoreau, to Cambridge with its memories of Holmes and Lowell, to Boston and the land of the Pilgrims, and then westward to the Berkshires, where Melville wrought upon his best romances and Bryant found inspiration for his loftiest verse. The work of each author is dealt with in association with its environment , and this method makes Mr. Wilson's book both a guide for the pilgrim and an illuminating review for the student.

Leseprobe

New England In Letters

RUFUS ROCKWELL WILSON

New England in Letters, Rufus Rockwell Wilson

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783849663278

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

FOREWORD... 1

CHAPTER I. Through Longfellow's Country. 2

CHAPTER II. Wanderings in Whittier Land. 14

CHAPTER III. The Salem of Hawthorne. 27

CHAPTER IV. Emerson and Others in Concord. 38

CHAPTER V. Cambridge and its Worthies. 50

CHAPTER VI. A Day of Literary Beginnings. 62

CHAPTER VII. The Autocrat and His Comrades. 76

CHAPTER VIII. The Boston of a Later Time. 90

CHAPTER IX. The Land of the Pilgrims. 105

CHAPTER X. A Winding Bay State Journey. 119

CHAPTER XI. The Berkshires and Beyond. 134

CHAPTER XII. Connecticut Wits and Worthies. 148

FOREWORD

THE present volume records a series of pilgrimages to the New England scenes and places associated with the men and women who have helped to make our literature, though brief its chronicle, one of our most precious heritages. The story of each author's life and work is told as far as possible in connection with its environment, and it is hoped that in this way the reader will be brought to a closer and more intimate knowledge of those who though dead yet live in the messages they have left for their fellows. The preparation of these pages has been for the author a source of delight: if they give pleasure to those into whose hands they fall he will feel that his labor has abundant reward.

R. R. W.

CHAPTER I. Through Longfellow's Country

WHEN it was ended there was reason to rejoice that the pilgrimage here recorded had its beginning in Portland, for Longfellow, best beloved of our poets, was born in the beautiful old town by the sea, cherished it beyond any place on earth and sang its charms in some of his sweetest verse. Here, as a youth, amid scenes upon which the eye never tires of feasting, he drank in the undying beauty of nature, and with it the lessons of love, patience and resignation which were the master influences in his literary career. One has but to read " My Lost Youth," "The Sea Diver," "The Skeleton in Armor," "The Lighthouse," and his other poems of the sea to know how abiding recollection of his boyhood home helped to shape the children of his fancy.

Portland honors Longfellow's memory in more than one graceful and appreciative way. There is a statue of the poet in the western end of the city, and the house at the corner of Hancock and Fore Streets where, in 1807, he was born is visited every year by a throng of pilgrims. It is still in a fair state of preservation, but the neighborhood has deteriorated since Longfellow's father lived in it, and it now wears an unkempt and slovenly air. Longfellow passed his youth in the house on Congress Street known as the Longfellow mansion and often mistaken for his birthplace. This house was bequeathed by his sister in 1901 to the Maine Historical Society upon condition that it should be kept in its present form, as a memorial to Longfellow and his family. Built in 1785 by General Peleg Wadsworth, grandfather of the poet, it was originally two stories high, a third being added in 1826; but it has undergone no alteration since the latter date, though it stands now in the heart of the business quarter of the town.

Portland was also the birthplace of Nathaniel Parker and Sara Payson Willis –– " Fanny Fern " –– and for the latter its beauty and charm were precious memories until her death. She tells us in her touching "Story About Myself" that while writing the book in widowed poverty her thoughts went back to her childhood home. She had often, in the olden time, wandered in the woods about Portland with her mother, who " always used to pluck a leaf of the fern to place in her bosom for its sweet odor." Living over again the vanished days, she said to herself: "My name shall be 'Fanny Fern,' little dreaming that anybody would ever know or care anything about it." "Many long days after this," she writes in another place, " I visited my birthplace, Portland. I wandered up and down the streets of that lovely, leafy city and tried to find the church where good Dr. Payson used to preach. Then, too, I wanted to see the house where I was born, the house where he laid hands of blessing on my baby forehead when it was purple with what they thought was the 'death agony.' But where it was that the little flickering life began, I could not find out."

Others have since discovered what she tried in vain to learn. On the site of a neat cottage at 72 Franklin Street once stood the house in which Nathaniel and Sara Willis were born. Their pious yet militant father was the founder of the Portland "Argus," and underwent imprisonment for his too caustic comments on the doings of his neighbors. James and Erastus Brooks were also Portland editors in their youth; and so was Seba Smith, one of the drollest of our early humorists, while there James G. Blaine tried his 'prentice hand at journalism. Another Portland editor of the old days, and one native to the soil, was John Neal, a prolific and gifted maker of books, who needed only the power of concentration to have left an enduring mark upon the literature of his time.

Portland also claims as her own Nathaniel Deering and Isaac McLellan, "poet of the rod and gun"; Ann S. Stephens and Elizabeth Payson Prentiss, whose once popular novels still find readers, and Elizabeth Akers Allen, whose "Rock me to Sleep, Mother," won for its author sure if slender fame; while Eliza Oakes, though born in another part of Maine, lived for a number of years in Portland, and there became the wife of Seba Smith. This gifted and beautiful woman was the first of her sex in this country to appear as a public lecturer, and among the first to speak from a pulpit. Sixty years ago her popularity was at its flood, and her writings in prose and verse carried her name to other lands. Men pass away, however, and their idols with them, and long before old age she had disappeared from public view. Her death in 1892 was notable chiefly because it reminded a busy and careless world that such a woman as Eliza Oakes Smith had ever lived.

While Longfellow was still a boy in Portland, Nathaniel Hawthorne came to dwell in another part of the same county. The latter was fourteen years old when, early in 1818, he was taken by his widowed mother to live in a house built for her by her brother in the town of Raymond, now as then a secluded, forest-girt hamlet, reached by a twenty-mile drive from Portland through the lovely valley of the Presumscott, or by an equal journey from the railway station at the southern end of Lake Sebago. The house occupied by the Hawthornes, a large two-storied wooden structure, was subsequently remodeled into a church. Though Mrs. Hawthorne and her daughters remained three or four years at Raymond, the son at the end of a twelvemonth was sent to school in Salem, and two years later he entered Bowdoin College. He returned, however, to spend his yearly vacations in the wilderness, and these visits compassed some of the most gratefully remembered experiences of his life.

Hawthorne, at a later time, spoke of Raymond as the place where" I first got my cursed habit of solitude "; yet he always relished solitude, and, he declares in another place, " I lived in Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed." During the long days of summer he roamed, gun in hand, through the great woods; and during the moonlight nights of winter he would skate for hours all alone upon Lake Sebago, with the deep shadows of the snow-clad hills on either hand. Now and then, when he got too far away from home to return, he would seek shelter in some logger's cabin, and there pass the night, warmed by a roaring wood-fire, watching the silent stars. " I ran quite wild, "he wrote in 1853, "and would, I think, have willingly run wild till this time, fishing all day long, or shooting with an old fowling-piece, but reading a good deal, too, on the rainy days, especially in Shakespeare and 'The Pilgrim's Progress' and any poetry or light books within reach."

Though Bowdoin when Hawthorne entered it in 1821 was a struggling institution of slender resources, it numbered poets and statesmen among its undergraduates, for his fellow-students included Longfellow and Franklin Pierce. Both of these men became his lifelong friends, but the one of his classmates who stood closest to him was Horatio Bridge, his chum and inseparable companion. Bridge, who afterwards served with distinction in the navy, seems earlier even than the embryo writer himself to have divined his true calling. "If anybody," Hawthorne wrote him in later years, " is responsible for my being an author, it is yourself. I know not whence your faith came; but while we were lads together at a country college, gathering blackberries in study hours under those tall academic pines; or watching the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons or gray squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching trout in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the forest though you and I will never cast a line in it again –– two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things the faculty never heard of, or else it had been worse for us –– still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of fiction."

Hawthorne's college room was 17 Maine Hall, one of the three dormitories of brick and stone which flank Bowdoin's wide-spreading campus. There remains no other visible memorial of his residence at Brunswick, though the site of the inn he describes in "Fanshawe" is marked by an elm. The presence of Longfellow, on the other hand, is felt in more than one corner of the old college town. The poet's room when a student was 27 Winthrop Hall; upon his return to Bowdoin in 1829 to become professor of modern languages he made his home in the house now occupied by General Joshua L. Chamberlain at the corner of Maine and Potter Streets; and at 23 Federal Street, an elm-shaded thoroughfare running from the Androscoggin to the college campus, one finds the house to which he brought his bride.

Mary Potter had been a schoolmate of Longfellow in their native Portland, and tradition has it that on the young professor's returning to the town after three years' absence in Europe, whence he had gone to fit himself for his duties at Bowdoin, he saw her at church and was so struck with her beauty and grace as to follow her home without venturing to accost her. But on reaching his own house, one of his biographers tells us, " he begged his sister to call with him at once at the Potter residence, and all the rest followed as in a novel." The husband was twenty-four and the wife nineteen years of age when they began married life in the Federal Street house –– a two-storied wooden structure of the type so often seen in New England, but still attractive under its goodly elms. The main portion of the house has a porch in front with the entrance hall behind it and a hall window above. Four windows on either side light corresponding rooms, and a large ell extends backward from the main house to the edge of a small bluff, marked by two old pine trees.

Longfellow has left us a pleasant picture of his study on the ground floor of the main house. " I can almost fancy myself in Spain," he writes on a June day in 1831, " the morning is so soft and beautiful. The tessellated shadow of the honeysuckle lies motionless upon my study floor, as if it were a figure in the carpet; and through the open window comes the fragrance of the wild briar and the mock orange. The birds are caroling in the trees, and their shadows flit across the window as they dart to and fro in the sunshine; while the murmur of the bee, the cooing of the doves from the eaves, and the whirring of a little humming-bird that has its nest in the honeysuckle, send up a sound of joy to meet the rising sun." Such was the nook in which Longfellow laid the corner-stone of his fame. Here he gave final form to his " Outre Mer " and his translation of the " Coplas of Jorge Manrique," and in a Brunswick shipyard found the material and impulse to write " The Building of the Ship." But his connection with Bowdoin came soon to an end. He left it in 1834, on the way to his long professorship at Harvard, and, save for an occasional visit in after years, the scene of his early labors knew him no more.

Sixteen years after Longfellow's departure from Bowdoin Calvin E. Stowe joined its faculty as professor of divinity, and with his wife, Harriet Beecher, took up his residence in a house at 63 Federal Street, soon to become historic as the birthplace of "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Mrs. Stowe 's father was Lyman Beecher and Henry Ward Beecher was her brother. She had passed her early married life in southern Ohio, on the border line between the free and slave States, and her experiences had bred an interest in the anti-slavery agitation which was shared to the full by her husband. Thus, when they settled in Brunswick, both were distressed at the apathy with which their new neighbors regarded the abolition movement, and it was not long before the wife conceived the idea of writing some sketches that should give the world a picture of slavery as she had seen it. One day while looking over a bound volume of an anti-slavery magazine she read an account of the escape of a slave and her child from Kentucky over the ice of the Ohio River. This was the first incident of a story that swiftly assumed shape in her mind, and for the model of Uncle Tom she took the husband of a former slave employed in her own family.

The scene of Uncle Tom's death, in which the pathos and dramatic force of the story reach a climax, was the first put on paper. This came to her mind while attending communion service in a Brunswick church. She went home and at once wrote out the chapter with such effective truth as to capture completely the sympathies of her children. After that the story took form rapidly, and, when the opening chapters were submitted to the "National Era," an anti-slavery journal published in Washington, the editor at once accepted it for serial publication. It was enthusiastically received from the outset, and without delay John P. Jewett, a young Boston publisher, offered to issue the whole in book form. His offer was accepted, and in March 1852, the first edition of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" came from the press.

Its success was immediate and without parallel in literary history. Ten thousand copies were sold in a fortnight; for months eight great presses were kept constantly at work; and in America alone 300,000 copies were sold within a year. Nor was its popularity limited to the author's own country; still less was it the success of a day. The book had an enormous sale in Europe, and after half a century is still read in scores of different languages. Its moral and political effect in bringing home to the people of the North the true meaning of slavery is now a commonplace of history. Mrs. Stowe was always of the opinion that the story had been written through her quite as much as by her, and an incident related by her biographer shows that this belief became more unquestioning with the years. While at Sag Harbor shortly before her death, an old sea-captain came up to shake hands with her, saying:

"I am glad to meet the woman who wrote 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"

"But I did not write it," answered the white-haired old lady as she shook the captain's hand.

" You didn't! " he ejaculated in amazement. " Why, who did then? "

"God wrote it," was the reply. "I merely did his dictation."

"Amen," said the captain reverently, as, hat in hand, he walked thoughtfully away.

The birthplace of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a house very like that to which Longfellow brought his bride, save that it lacks the porch mentioned in the case of the other. It was owned in earlier days by John Titcomb, a professor of odd jobs, and a well-known figure in the Brunswick of his time, to whom Mrs. Stowe makes frequent and humorous reference in her letters. Her occupancy of the Titcomb house ended in 1852, when her husband left Bowdoin to become professor of sacred literature at Andover Theological Seminary. Maine, however, gave being to one of her later stories, that charming idyl, "The Pearl of Orr's Island," which borrowed its setting from an island near Brunswick, where the author spent many summer months.

It is a roundabout journey from New Brunswick to Waterford, but it leads through many a stretch of charming scenery, and it takes one to the birthplace and grave of Charles Farrar Browne, the droll and whimsical genius best known to folk of his own time as Artemus Ward. Waterford lies among the foothills of the White Mountains, and under the very shadow of Mount Tir'm, so named, according to local tradition, from the Indians, who in climbing its steep sides were wont to say, "Tire um Injuns." Its site, a level plain known as Waterford Flat, affords room for only a small number of buildings, and in this hamlet of five score inhabitants, on an April day, in 1834, Charles Farrar Browne entered life. His birthplace was destroyed by fire many years ago, but the two-storied house, painted white with green window-blinds, in which he passed the greater part of his boyhood, still stands, under sheltering elms, on the north side of the village green. Browne's father died when he was only thirteen years old, and a little later the son left Waterford to make his own way in the world. He often returned, however, to this hamlet among the hills, and, as he grew in fame, his visits to Waterford became occasions of social interest in which all of the people of the place had part. Those who remember him will tell you that he extended his hand to every child and greeted all he met as neighbors and friends. Only one door was he known to pass. Some rich relatives of his mother who held aloof from him when he was a poor printer and most needed their friendship, were now fain to offer him the hospitalities of their home, but he never called to accept them. Browne had a wanderer's love for his birthplace. When dying in England, at the early age of thirty-three, he made request that his body be brought to Waterford for burial, and it now lies beside those of his parents, brothers and sister in the little village cemetery. A granite monument at the left of the family plot bears simply the word "Browne," but on the plain white headstone which marks the grave of the gentle humorist is inscribed the legend –– " His memory will live as a sweet and unfading recollection."

The burial garth in which Browne takes his rest borrows its name of Elm Vale from a farm christened and long owned by Robert Haskins, the uncle of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and there in the days of his youth the sage of Concord passed many happy hours. Robert Haskins, of Boston, born in 1774, at the age of twenty-three took to wife Rebecca, daughter of the Reverend William Emerson, of Concord. The same year the town of Waterford hired the Reverend Lincoln Ripley to minister to the spiritual needs of its people. His brother was the second husband of Mrs. Haskins' mother, and it was his settlement in the community that in 1802 brought Robert Haskins to Waterford, where he established the first store in the town, becoming also a farmer and manufacturer. He settled first in a locality known as Plummer Hill, but later established the Elm Vale homestead which long stood just across the road from the cemetery of the same name. Shaded by mighty elms, the house erected by Haskins was built of pine from primeval trees, and when it was burned there disappeared a splendid example of the housebuilding of three generations ago. Here when a young man and even in his mature years Ralph Waldo Emerson visited his aunts, Mrs. Haskins, and her maiden sister, Mary Moody Emerson. But he came to Elm Vale only once after it had passed into the hands of strangers, and then, its interior having been much changed, he would not enter the old house. He asked leave, instead, to visit the orchard, where he filled his pockets with apples, and then returned to his carriage. Elm Vale never saw him again.

The morrow of his visit to Waterford found the writer among the New Hampshire hills at the birthplace of Daniel Webster. The records tell us that Webster's father, a Puritan of stern and sterling character, served under Wolfe in the French war, and later was a captain in the Revolutionary army. A few years before the War of Independence, he received a grant of land in the then remote wilderness along the Merrimac River, and in what is now the town of Salisbury erected a log-cabin, with no other white man's habitation between it and the Canadian border. The elder Webster, who was twice married, commemorated his second union by building a one-story frame house hard by the log-cabin of the first days. Daniel was born in this house, which still exists as the wing of a later structure a few rods from its original location. Its former site is now marked by a huge boulder, and by the side of the latter is a tall staff, from which a flag floats on pleasant days.

Near the boulder is a well, shaded by an elm tree which was planted in 1768 by Webster's father. For sixty summers the son, at regular visits, sat beneath its spreading branches and looked upon the fields his father's labors had wrested from the wilderness. The Salisbury farm is situated about two miles from the subsequent homestead of the Websters in South Franklin. It has few fertile spots. Granite rocks are everywhere visible and give an air of barrenness to the scene. Yet standing upon the spot the thought is strong within one that these "crystal hills gray and cloud-topped" among which Webster was cradled, and the rough pastures in which he grew to man's estate left their quickening impress upon the majestic physical and mental stature which gave him a foremost place among great Americans. One also loves to think that among these wild hills he wooed the gentle-natured woman who became his wife and the mother of his children. Winsome Grace Fletcher was a schoolteacher in Salisbury, not far from Webster's birthplace, when the young lawyer with the great dark eyes took her heart and life into his keeping. Tradition has it that he one day assisted her in disentangling a skein of silk. Then taking up a piece of tape, he said:

"Grace, cannot you help me to tie a knot that will never untie? "

"I don't know, Daniel," was the blushing answer, "but I am willing to try."

The knot was tied, and until her death twenty years later hers was the most gracious influence in her husband's life, her memory remaining with him as a benediction until the end.

It is a delightful drive on a summer's morning from Salisbury to the shaded town of Hanover, the seat of Dartmouth College, whose chief boast is that it was Webster's alma mater. Ambition for his children was the controlling motive in the later life of Captain Ebenezer Webster, and he strained his scanty means to the utmost to give his youngest son the best education within reach, first at Exeter Academy and later at Dartmouth. In 1797, Daniel, a slender lad of fifteen, entered the latter institution, then in its struggling infancy.

Desperately poor, despite his father's sacrifices, his four years in college were years not only of hard labor, but of struggle against obstacles that would have balked a weaker spirit. When a friend sent him a recipe for greasing boots, he hastened to thank him. "But," he wrote, "my boots need other doctoring, for they not only admit water, but even peas and gravel-stones." His college days, nevertheless, were happy ones, and his classmates were wont in after years to recall his singular charm of presence and his rapid progress in the studies he liked –– Latin, literature and history. They also recalled that he was ambitious to lead even then, and that, all things considered, he was the most remarkable of the undergraduates of his time. " If anything difficult was to be done," writes one of them, "the task was laid upon Webster."

The visitor to Hanover comes upon more than one interesting reminder of the college days of this " mighty man in the moulding process." During his freshman and sophomore years Webster was an inmate of the house of Humphrey Farrar, which yet stands near the corner of Main and Lebanon Streets, and during his junior year he occupied the south chamber of what is now known as the McMurphy house at the corner of Main Street and Webster Avenue. He lodged during his senior year in Dartmouth Hall, the oldest of the college buildings, and tradition has it that his was the room then and now numbered 1, northwest corner of the third story. Webster was graduated from Dartmouth in 1801; and that until the end it held a warm place in his affections is attested by his oft-repeated visits to Hanover in after years and by the noble service which he rendered the college in one of the greatest of his triumphs at the bar. Nor are those which have to do with Webster the only cherished associations Hanover and Dartmouth offer to the lover of books and bookmen: James Freeman Clarke was born in the town, and Rufus Choate and George P. Marsh were graduated from the college, where Oliver Wendell Holmes and Arthur Sherburne Hardy were professors in the morning of their careers.

The writer's way when he left Hanover led through Concord and the countryside hamlet of Amherst to Portsmouth by the sea. Concord guards the dust of Franklin Pierce and of that stout apostle of freedom, John P. Hale, but the pleasant town claims a place in this chronicle by reason of its memories of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and of that singular genius, who, born plain Benjamin Thompson, lives in history as Count Rumford. It was in a fine old house yet standing in South Spring Street, Concord, not, however, on its original site, that Emerson wooed and wed Ellen Louisa Tucker, the beloved wife of his youth so soon to be taken from him by death, while the Rolfe and Rumford Asylum in Hale Street helps to keep fresh the romance of Thompson's early manhood.

The wealthiest man in the Concord of colonial days was Colonel Benjamin Rolfe, who in 1764 built for himself a noble dwelling. Five years later, at the age of sixty, he took to wife the daughter of the minister of the town, a comely maiden of half his years. Then the colonel died, and when in 1772 Thompson, a handsome stripling in the flush of his youth, came to Concord to teach school the widow promptly lost her heart to him. He was nineteen and she was thirty-three, but the tiny god of love mocks at disparity in age as well as at locks and keys. So the young schoolmaster and the widow were married at the end of a brief courtship, and took up their abode in the mansion of the old colonel, where was born their only child, Sarah Thompson, afterwards Countess of Rumford. When the Revolution broke Thompson chose the side of the King, and in 1775 fled to England. The remainder of his long career, a career of brilliant and practically unbroken success, belongs to the history of science and political economy in Europe. He never lost interest, however, in his native land and when, in 1791, he was, for his scientific work, raised to the dignity of Count of the Holy Roman Empire, he chose for his title that of Rumford the early name of the town where he had won his bride, and where his first advancement had come to him

The Count's wife who, as he often declared in after years, "had married him rather than he her," never followed him across seas, but shortly after her death, in 1792, their daughter joined her father in Europe, and when, in 1814, he, too, passed away, was allowed to take the title of Countess. After long residence in France and England, the Countess of Rumford, in 1844, returned to America. Eight years later she died in the house in which she was born, and which, with an adequate fund for its support provided in her will, –– the death, in 1809, of her childless step-brother, Paul Rolfe, had made her a rich woman, –– now serves as an asylum for poor girls. Though Count Rumford 's fame has been somewhat dimmed by the years, and for his countrymen blemished by what many of them would term his political apostacy, the fact remains that it was founded upon scientific labors of the first importance, while the clear, forcible English of his essays, which are models of their kind, entitles their author to high rank among America's early men of letters. Those who have read them will not deny the fine old mansion in which Thompson's career may be said to have begun a place among our literary landmarks.

A prophet is too often without honor in his own country, but the chief boast of the folk of Amherst is that there Horace Greeley passed his boyhood. The house in which the founder of the New York " Tribune " was born on a May-day in 1811 is a story-and-a-half cottage of old-fashioned farm style still in a fair state of preservation, and is situated some four miles back from the village. It stands now as then in a lonesome and unfrequented region on a farm of eighty acres of as rocky and unproductive land as can be found in all New England. Yet to the writer its bleak aspect seemed in keeping with the somber life story of its whilom owner, Zaccheus Greeley. The career of that sturdy but unsuccessful laborer instanced the helplessness of the human thistledown before the winds of fate. Industrious and willing, but ever a failure, he struggled with debt from youth to old age, nor did his troubles end until his son came to man's estate and managed to ease his declining years.

When the boy Horace was ten years old the Greeley family was sold out of house, lands and goods for debt, and left Amherst to begin the wanderings which ended finally in western Pennsylvania. Before that, however, the younger Greeley had given proof of the intense love of knowledge and of the mental and moral endowment that were to make him with the passage of the years the strongest individual force in the journalism of his time. It is, as has been noted, a subject of pride to the people of Amherst that in their town the great editor first saw the light, and aged residents are quick to declare that during his lifetime all of his former townsmen borrowed from him their political opinions. Above the front door of the old homestead is now posted the legend: "In this house Horace Greeley was born." The present owner told the writer that it is often sought by visitors, despite the fact that it lies so far removed from the beaten lines of travel.

Portsmouth is an old town as things are reckoned on this side of the sea, and, though its glory has in a measure departed, one feels as he saunters along its broad, quiet, tree-girt streets that it has known how to grow old in a graceful and becoming way. Time was when it carried on an extensive trade with the West Indies and promised as a maritime port to eclipse both Boston and New York. It was this promise of future greatness that, in 1807, shortly after his admission to the bar, drew Daniel Webster to the town, where during nine years of fruitful labor he grew into greatness as a lawyer and gained the transcendent power of speech which made him supreme among the orators of his time. Portsmouth holds few intimate reminders of Webster's residence in the town, for the fire which visited it in December 1813, laying bare a tract fifteen acres in extent, destroyed his home and library. However, the gambrel-roofed cottage to which he brought his bride yet stands in Vaughan Street, and he must often have been a guest in many another old house spared by the years. One of these borrows added interest from the fact that it was in his last days the summer home of Francis Parkman, the historian.

This is the Wentworth mansion at Little Harbor, in the outskirts of Portsmouth, a picturesque rambling pile which time and change have touched with gentle hand. The visitor approaches it by a lane, which winding through pine woods and outcropping ledges of rock touched off in summer with juniper and flaming sumach, leads at last to a field on the end of a point in the bay, and past a few old apple trees, to the mansion standing close to the waterside. Built in 1750 by Benning Wentworth, for more than a quarter of a century royal governor of New Hampshire, the old house, with its many angles and gables, its quaint rooms connected in the oddest manner by unexpected steps leading up and down, and its one spacious high-studded apartment where the governor's council used to meet, remains nearly as its first owner left it.

One has but to cross the threshold of the door to step into the colonial period, and to be a witness, in fancy, of the romantic episode turned to account by Longfellow in the last series of the " Tales of a Wayside Inn " –– the marriage of Governor Benning Wentworth with Martha Hilton, a union very like that of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid. Martha Hilton, so runs the story, was a Portsmouth waif who when still "a thin slip of a girl " went to live as a servant with Governor Wentworth in this mansion looking out to sea. She grew with the years into one of the fairest of women, and the governor, a lonely widower, fell in love with and resolved to marry her. Accordingly, keeping his own counsel, he invited a number of his friends, the Reverend Arthur Brown among them, to dine with him on his birthday. The dinner ended and pipes and tobacco laid before the company, Martha Hilton, garbed as became a great man's bride, glided into the room, and stood blushing in front of her master and his guests. Then the governor, rising from his seat.

"Played slightly with his ruffles, then looked down,

And said unto the Reverend Arthur Brown:

'This is my birthday; it shall likewise be

My wedding day; and you shall marry me.'"

"To whom, your excellency?" asked the rector.

"To this lady," was the answer of the governor, as he took Martha Hilton by the hand. The reverend gentleman hesitated, knowing the humble footing Martha had held in the household, but his host would brook no delay. "As the chief magistrate of New Hampshire," cried the governor, "I command you to marry me." This order was not to be disobeyed, and so the pretty serving-maid became Lady Wentworth. She proved, moreover, a faultless wife, and gave the governor so much happiness during the short span of life that remained to him that he left her his entire estate. One regrets to add that her second husband, a retired colonel of the British army, who bore the name of Wentworth but was in no way related to the first, speedily wasted her fortune in high living, and then died, tradition has it, by his own hand.

The mansion at Little Harbor is now owned and occupied by J. T. Coolidge, Jr., whose wife was the daughter of Francis Parkman. There, as already stated, the historian at the close of his life passed many summer days, perhaps the happiest and most peaceful of his heroic and fruitful career. There also, it should be added, he wrote a part of "Montcalm and Wolfe," and finished "A Half Century of Conflict," with which he brought to a close the labors of a lifetime.

CHAPTER II. Wanderings in Whittier Land

BENJAMIN P. SHILLABER and James T. Fields were natives of Portsmouth, and a house yet standing at 23 Court Street was the birthplace of Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Celia Thaxter was also born in the old town, but passed most of her days on the Isles of Shoals, nine miles out at sea from Portsmouth. The writer on a sunny summer morning boarded a small steamer on the Portsmouth waterfront, and, passing pleasant Kitteryside, where stands the stately house built by Sir William Pepperell, hero of Louisburg, gained the open sea and made for Appledore, the largest of these isles. There are nine of them in all, tips of sunken mountains that bristle with danger for sailor-folk approaching them at night or in a fog, and no after-comer can tell their story half so well as Celia Thaxter has told it with her own poetic pen.

She was but five years old when in 1840 her father, Thomas B. Laighton, chagrined at some disappointment in his hope of a public career, resolved to withdraw forever from the world, and, accepting the position of lighthouse keeper at White Island, the one of the isles most remote from the mainland, went there to live with his wife and children. Thence, at the end of six years, he removed with his family to Appledore, of which he became the owner. There his daughter Celia, with her brothers, her books and the sea for comrades, grew toward womanhood. She was barely fifteen, however, when she was borne away by a husband, a man of education and gentle birth, who had come as a missionary to the fishermen on the adjacent island, called Star. Thereafter the mainland was her home, but for more than thirty years she returned to spend each summer on Appledore.

A growing throng of vacation-time visitors, meanwhile, made discovery of Mrs. Thaxter's island retreat, and her cottage, with windows looking out on the breezy sparkling sea, became as the years went on the meeting-place of a devoted circle of choice spirits, who selected themselves rather than were selected from the vast number of persons who frequented the great house of entertainment conducted by her brothers. Yet there was another side to the life of this gifted and beautiful woman her never-ending efforts to contribute to the comfort of the humble folk about her and this is illustrated from a leaf in her book on the Shoals. During a long, dreary storm two men had come in a boat to Appledore, asking for help. "A little child," she writes, " had died at Star Island, and they could not sail to the mainland, and had no means to construct a coffin among themselves. All day I had watched the making of that little chrysalis, and at night the last nail was driven in and it lay across a bench, in the midst of the litter of the workshop, and a curious stillness seemed to emanate from the senseless boards. I went back to the house and gathered a handful of scarlet geraniums and returned with it through the rain. The brilliant blossoms were sprinkled with glittering drops. I laid them in the little coffin, while the wind wailed so sorrowfully outside, and the rain poured against the windows. Two men came through the mist and storm, and one swung the little light shell to his shoulder, and they carried it away, and the gathering darkness shut down and hid them as they tossed among the waves. I never saw the little girl, but where they buried her I know; the lighthouse shines close by, and every night the quiet, constant ray steals to her grave and softly touches it, as if to say, with a caress: "Sleep well! Be thankful you are spared so much that I see humanity endure, fixed here forever where I stand."

In June 1894, Mrs. Thaxter returned for the last time to Appledore. A few weeks later death came to her, as she had often voiced the wish that it would come, almost without warning; and on a quiet afternoon in the late summer her brothers and those nearest to her bore her body to its burial on her island, within sound of " the sad, caressing murmur of the wave that breaks in tender music on the shore." The writer found her grave a mound of blossoms, the care of loving hands, and standing beside it he was made to feel that with the silent singer all was well.

The Isles of Shoals have also their memories of John Greenleaf Whittier, for one of the Quaker poet's pleasures in the last years of his life was an occasional visit to Appledore. Fond of the comfort of a large hotel, "he liked," writes Mrs. Fields, "to make arrangements with a group of his more particular friends to meet him there; and when he was well enough to leave his room, he might be seen in some carefully chosen corner of the great piazzas enjoying the keenest happiness in the society of those dear to him." Now and then he would pass whole days in Mrs. Thaxter's parlor, often for hours taking no part in the conversation around him, and the friend just quoted adds a welcome glimpse of the comradeship of the white-haired bard and his sister singer.

It was the Sabbath and Whittier, sitting patiently in the corner of the pretty room, had wearied of the idle talk of the idle people who had been drifting in and out during the day, and longed for something that would move those about him to higher levels. Suddenly, as if the idea had struck him like an inspiration, he rose, and taking a volume of Emerson from the library, he opened to one of the discourses, and handing it to Celia Thaxter asked her to read it aloud, saying he thought all would like to hear it. "After she had ended," says Mrs. Fields, "he took up the thread of the discourse, and talked long and earnestly upon the beauty and necessity of worship –– a necessity consequent upon the nature of man, upon his own weakness, and his consciousness of the Divine spirit within him. His whole heart was stirred, and he poured himself out toward us as if he longed, like the prophet of old, to breathe a new life into us. I could see that he reproached himself for not having spoken out in this way before, but his enfranchised spirit took only a stronger flight for the delay."

It is a short sail, and, on a summer afternoon, a pleasant one from Appledore to Newburyport, where Whittier's fledgling efforts as a poet found their way into print. Newburyport might sit for its portrait as an ideal seaport town. It lies on a ridge at the mouth of the Merrimac, which here widens into a noble harbor. Cross streets run down the hillsides to this harbor, while High Street, the main thoroughfare of the town, stretches parallel with the river for more than six miles, shaded all the way by ancient elms and lined with rich farms and pleasant residences that have wide meadows and orchards behind, and sloping lawns in front. And always the sound of the sea is heard by dwellers in the town, while at every turn one comes upon reminders of the long-departed days when wealth and splendor made their home here, and the merchants, whose florid faces, preserved for us by Smibert and Copley, bespeak familiar acquaintance with good cheer, sent their ships and captains to trade in all of the Seven Seas.

Newburyport, moreover, holds an honored if modest place in the history of thought and letters. Here Theophilus Parsons, "great and venerable name," was born and bred, and, studying law with him, Rufus King and John Quincy Adams passed their early manhood. Here George Whitefield, of whom Buckle wrote, that if oratory was to be judged by its effects he was the most eloquent man since the apostles, died in a house yet standing at 9 School Street, and here he takes his rest under the pulpit of the Old South Church at the corner of School and Federal Streets, where for nearly a hundred years there has stood a marble monument to his memory. Cornelius C. Felton, scholar and college president, was born in Old Newbury; George Lunt, a poet of no mean pretensions, was a native of Newburyport; here Harriet Livermore, the devoted missionary whom "Snowbound" celebrates, was born; here Richard Hildreth began his work as a historian; and here John Pierpont wrote his best verse, as did Hannah Gould and Lucy Hooper in later years.

Caleb Gushing, a man who like Bacon took all knowledge for his kingdom, was born in Salisbury, just across the river from Newburyport, and died in a stately house set in spacious grounds at 63 High Street. James Parton, the historian, also passed his last years in the town, and at the corner of High and Oakland Streets one comes upon the roomy house fronted by a wide stretch of lawn in which he wrote his master work –– the "Life of Voltaire." Yet another author once a resident of Newburyport is Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who, when filling a Unitarian pulpit in the town, lived at 15 Pond Street in a house small and plain to the point of bareness, but whose beautiful outlook must have compensated its occupant for what it lacked in size and comfort.

A dozen years after Colonel Higginson had left Newburyport and the pulpit, there was submitted to James Russell Lowell, then editor of the "Atlantic Monthly," a sparkling and original story of Paris life. The author, hitherto unknown to fame, was Harriet Prescott, a young woman living in Newburyport. Lowell, deeply impressed by the story when he read it in manuscript, was at first inclined to regard it as a clever translation from the French; but Colonel Higginson, who knew the author and had helped to develop her budding talents, became responsible, when she appealed to him, for its originality. Then the story was accepted, and when it appeared in the "Atlantic Monthly, " early in 1859, it made the author's reputation.

Six years later Miss Prescott, who meanwhile had published "Sir Rohan's Ghost" and "The Amber Gods," became the wife of Richard S. Spofford, a lawyer of Newburyport, and in due course of time they made their home on a picturesque island in the Merrimac, midway between Newburyport and Amesbury. There they lived for many years, and there the wife now a widow still makes her home in summer. One would have to go far to find a more charming retreat. Great pine trees on one side of the quaint old house in which Mrs. Spofford dwells and the river rushing past on the other make its seclusion complete, while the romance and poetry of sky and stream, of wood and field, which give richness and color alike to her prose and verse, are a part of her island's very atmosphere. The writer when he beheld it for the first time gave thanks for the chain of circumstances which made it a poet and story-teller's abiding-place.