Part 12

He was married on September 28, 1857, to Elizabeth Dwight, daughter of Edmund Dwight, Esq., a woman of rare qualities and great public usefulness, who singularly carried on the tradition of those Essex County women of an earlier generation, who were such strong helpmates to their husbands. Of Mrs. Cabot it might almost have been said, as was said by John Lowell in 1826 of his cousin, Elizabeth Higginson, wife of her double first cousin, George Cabot: “She had none of the advantages of early education afforded so bountifully to the young ladies of the present age; but she surpassed _all_ of them in the acuteness of her observation, in the knowledge of human nature, and in her power of expressing and defending the opinions which she had formed.”[21] Thus Elliot Cabot writes of his wife: “From the time when the care of her children ceased to occupy the most of her time, she gradually became one of the most valuable of the town officials, as well as the unofficial counselor of many who needed the unfailing succor of her inexhaustible sympathy and practical helpfulness.”

Cabot visited Europe anew after his marriage, and after his return, served for nine years as a school-committee-man in Brookline, where he resided. He afterwards did faithful duty for six years as chairman of the examining committee of Harvard Overseers. He gave for a single year a series of lectures on Kant at Harvard University, and for a time acted as instructor in Logic there, which included a supervision of the forensics or written discussions then in vogue. The Civil War aroused his sympathies strongly, especially when his brother Edward and his personal friend, Francis L. Lee, became respectively Lieutenant-Colonel and Colonel of the 44th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Elliot Cabot himself enlisted in a drill club, and did some work for the Sanitary Commission. He also assisted greatly in organizing the Museum of Fine Arts and in the administration of the Boston Athenæum.

Though a life-long student, he wrote little for the press,—a fact which recalls Theodore Parker’s remark about him, that he “could make a good law argument, but could not address it to the jury.” He rendered, however, a great and permanent service, far outweighing that performed by most American authors of his time, as volunteer secretary to Ralph Waldo Emerson, a task which constituted his main occupation for five or six years. After Emerson’s death, Cabot also wrote his memoirs, by the wish of the family,—a book which will always remain the primary authority on the subject with which it deals, although it was justly criticised by others for a certain restricted tone which made it seem to be, as it really was, the work of one shy and reticent man telling the story of another. In describing Emerson, the biographer often unconsciously described himself also; and the later publications of Mr. Emerson’s only son show clearly that there was room for a more ample and varied treatment in order to complete the work.

Under these circumstances, Cabot’s home life, while of even tenor, was a singularly happy one. One of his strongest and life-long traits was his love of children,—a trait which he also eminently shared with Emerson. The group formed by him with two grandchildren in his lap, to whom he was reading John Gilpin or Hans Andersen, is one which those who knew him at home would never forget. It was characteristic also that in his German copy of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” already mentioned, there were found some papers covered with drawings of horses and carts which had been made to amuse some eager child. Akin to this was his strong love of flowers, united with a rare skill in making beautiful shrubs grow here and there in such places as would bring out the lines and curves of his estate at Beverly. Even during the last summer of his life, he was cutting new little vistas on the Beverly hills. His sketches of landscape in water-color were also very characteristic both of his delicate and poetic appreciation of nature and of his skill and interest in drawing. In 1885, while in Italy, he used to draw objects seen from the car window as he traveled; and often in the morning, when his family came down to breakfast at hotels, they found that he had already made an exquisite sketch in pencil of some tower or arch.

His outward life, on the whole, seemed much akin to the lives led by that considerable class of English gentlemen who adopt no profession, dwelling mainly on their paternal estates, yet are neither politicians nor fox-hunters; pursuing their own favorite studies, taking part from time to time in the pursuits of science, art, or literature, even holding minor public functions, but winning no widespread fame. He showed, on the other hand, the freedom from prejudice, the progressive tendency, and the ideal proclivities which belong more commonly to Americans. He seemed to himself to have accomplished nothing; and yet he had indirectly aided a great many men by the elevation of his tone and the breadth of his intellectual sympathy. If he did not greatly help to stimulate the thought of his time, he helped distinctly to enlarge and ennoble it. His death occurred at Brookline, Massachusetts, on January 16, 1903. He died as he had lived, a high-minded, stainless, and in some respects unique type of American citizen.

XIX

EMILY DICKINSON

EMILY DICKINSON

Few events in American literary history have been more curious than the sudden rise of Emily Dickinson many years since into a posthumous fame only more accentuated by the utterly recluse character of her life. The lines which formed a prelude to the first volume of her poems are the only ones that have yet come to light which indicate even a temporary desire to come in contact with the great world of readers; for she seems to have had no reference, in all the rest, to anything but her own thought and a few friends. But for her only sister, it is very doubtful if her poems would ever have been printed at all; and when published, they were launched quietly and without any expectation of a wide audience. Yet the outcome of it was that six editions of the volume were sold within six months, a suddenness of success almost without a parallel in American literature.

On April 16, 1862, I took from the post-office the following letter:—

MR. HIGGINSON,—Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?

The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask.

Should you think it breathed, and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude.

If I make the mistake, that you dared to tell me would give me sincerer honor toward you.

I inclose my name, asking you, if you please, sir, to tell me what is true?

That you will not betray me it is needless to ask, since honor is its own pawn.

The letter was postmarked “Amherst,” and it was in a handwriting so peculiar that it seemed as if the writer might have taken her first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum of that college town. Yet it was not in the slightest degree illiterate, but cultivated, quaint, and wholly unique. Of punctuation there was little; she used chiefly dashes, and it has been thought better, in printing these letters, as with her poems, to give them the benefit in this respect of the ordinary usages; and so with her habit as to capitalization, as the printers call it, in which she followed the Old English and present German method of thus distinguishing every noun substantive. But the most curious thing about the letter was the total absence of a signature. It proved, however, that she had written her name on a card, and put it under the shelter of a smaller envelope inclosed in the larger; and even this name was written—as if the shy writer wished to recede as far as possible from view—in pencil, not in ink. The name was Emily Dickinson. Inclosed with the letter were four poems, two of which have since been separately printed,—“Safe in their alabaster chambers” and “I’ll tell you how the sun rose,” besides the two that here follow. The first comprises in its eight lines a truth so searching that it seems a condensed summary of the whole experience of a long life:—

“We play at paste Till qualified for pearl; Then drop the paste And deem ourself a fool.

“The shapes, though, were similar And our new hands Learned gem-tactics, Practicing sands.”

Then came one which I have always classed among the most exquisite of her productions, with a singular felicity of phrase and an aerial lift that bears the ear upward with the bee it traces:—

“The nearest dream recedes unrealized. The heaven we chase, Like the June bee Before the schoolboy, Invites the race, Stoops to an easy clover, Dips—evades—teases—deploys— Then to the royal clouds Lifts his light pinnace, Heedless of the boy Staring, bewildered, at the mocking sky.

“Homesick for steadfast honey,— Ah! the bee flies not Which brews that rare variety.”

The impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius was as distinct on my mind at the first reading of these four poems as it is now, after half a century of further knowledge; and with it came the problem never yet solved, what place ought to be assigned in literature to what is so remarkable, yet so elusive of criticism. The bee himself did not evade the schoolboy more than she evaded me; and even at this day I still stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy.

Circumstances, however, soon brought me in contact with an uncle of Emily Dickinson, a gentleman not now living: a prominent citizen of Worcester, Massachusetts, a man of integrity and character, who shared her abruptness and impulsiveness, but certainly not her poetic temperament, from which he was indeed singularly remote. He could tell but little of her, she being evidently an enigma to him, as to me. It is hard to say what answer was made by me, under these circumstances, to this letter. It is probable that the adviser sought to gain time a little and find out with what strange creature he was dealing. I remember to have ventured on some criticism which she afterwards called “surgery,” and on some questions, part of which she evaded, as will be seen, with a naïve skill such as the most experienced and worldly coquette might envy. Her second letter (received April 26, 1862) was as follows:—

MR. HIGGINSON,—Your kindness claimed earlier gratitude, but I was ill, and write to-day from my pillow.

Thank you for the surgery; it was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others, as you ask, though they might not differ. While my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction; but when I put them in the gown, they look alike and numb.

You asked how old I was? I made no verse, but one or two, until this winter, sir.

I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does of the burying ground, because I am afraid.

You inquire my books. For poets, I have Keats, and Mr. and Mrs. Browning. For prose, Mr. Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Revelations. I went to school, but in your manner of the phrase had no education. When a little girl, I had a friend who taught me Immortality; but venturing too near, himself, he never returned. Soon after my tutor died, and for several years my lexicon was my only companion. Then I found one more, but he was not contented I be his scholar, so he left the land.

You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise in the pool at noon excels my piano.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind. They are religious, except me, and address an eclipse, every morning, whom they call their “Father.”

But I fear my story fatigues you. I would like to learn. Could you tell me how to grow, or is it unconveyed, like melody or witchcraft?

You speak of Mr. Whitman. I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful.

I read Miss Prescott’s “Circumstance,” but it followed me in the dark, so I avoided her.

Two editors of journals came to my father’s house this winter, and asked me for my mind, and when I asked them “why” they said I was penurious, and they would use it for the world.

I could not weigh myself, myself. My size felt small to me. I read your chapters in the “Atlantic,” and experienced honor for you. I was sure you would not reject a confiding question.

Is this, sir, what you asked me to tell you? Your friend,

E. DICKINSON.

It will be seen that she had now drawn a step nearer, signing her name, and as my “friend.” It will also be noticed that I had sounded her about certain American authors, then much read; and that she knew how to put her own criticisms in a very trenchant way. With this letter came some more verses, still in the same birdlike script, as for instance the following:—

“Your riches taught me poverty, Myself a millionaire In little wealths, as girls could boast, Till, broad as Buenos Ayre, You drifted your dominions A different Peru, And I esteemed all poverty For life’s estate, with you.

“Of mines, I little know, myself, But just the names of gems, The colors of the commonest, And scarce of diadems So much that, did I meet the queen, Her glory I should know; But this must be a different wealth, To miss it, beggars so.

“I’m sure ’tis India, all day, To those who look on you Without a stint, without a blame, Might I but be the Jew! I’m sure it is Golconda Beyond my power to deem, To have a smile for mine, each day, How better than a gem!

“At least, it solaces to know That there exists a gold Although I prove it just in time Its distance to behold; Its far, far treasure to surmise And estimate the pearl That slipped my simple fingers through While just a girl at school!”

Here was already manifest that defiance of form, never through carelessness, and never precisely from whim, which so marked her. The slightest change in the order of words—thus, “While yet at school, a girl”—would have given her a rhyme for this last line; but no; she was intent upon her thought, and it would not have satisfied her to make the change. The other poem further showed, what had already been visible, a rare and delicate sympathy with the life of nature:—

“A bird came down the walk; He did not know I saw; He bit an angle-worm in halves And ate the fellow raw.

“And then he drank a dew From a convenient grass, And then hopped sidewise to a wall, To let a beetle pass.

“He glanced with rapid eyes That hurried all around; They looked like frightened beads, I thought; He stirred his velvet head

“Like one in danger, cautious. I offered him a crumb, And he unrolled his feathers And rowed him softer home

“Than oars divide the ocean, Too silver for a seam— Or butterflies, off banks of noon, Leap, plashless as they swim.”

It is possible that in a second letter I gave more of distinct praise or encouragement, as her third is in a different mood. This was received June 8, 1862. There is something startling in its opening image; and in the yet stranger phrase that follows, where she apparently uses “mob” in the sense of chaos or bewilderment:

DEAR FRIEND,—Your letter gave no drunkenness, because I tasted rum before. Domingo comes but once; yet I have had few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue.

My dying tutor told me that he would like to live till I had been a poet, but Death was much of mob as I could master, then. And when, far afterward, a sudden light on orchards, or a new fashion in the wind troubled my attention, I felt a palsy, here, the verses just relieve.

Your second letter surprised me, and for a moment, swung. I had not supposed it. Your first gave no dishonor, because the true are not ashamed. I thanked you for your justice, but could not drop the bells whose jingling cooled my tramp. Perhaps the balm seemed better, because you bled me first. I smile when you suggest that I delay “to publish,” that being foreign to my thought as firmament to fin.

If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her; if she did not, the longest day would pass me on the chase, and the approbation of my dog would forsake me then. My barefoot rank is better.

You think my gait “spasmodic.” I am in danger, sir. You think me “uncontrolled.” I have no tribunal.

Would you have time to be the “friend” you should think I need? I have a little shape: it would not crowd your desk, nor make much racket as the mouse that dens your galleries.

If I might bring you what I do—not so frequent to trouble you—and ask you if I told it clear, ’twould be control to me. The sailor cannot see the North, but knows the needle can. The “hand you stretch me in the dark” I put mine in, and turn away. I have no Saxon now:—

As if I asked a common alms, And in my wandering hand A stranger pressed a kingdom, And I, bewildered, stand; As if I asked the Orient Had it for me a morn, And it should lift its purple dikes And shatter me with dawn!

But, will you be my preceptor, Mr. Higginson?

With this came the poem since published in one of her volumes and entitled “Renunciation”; and also that beginning “Of all the sounds dispatched abroad,” thus fixing approximately the date of those two. I must soon have written to ask her for her picture, that I might form some impression of my enigmatical correspondent. To this came the following reply, in July, 1862:—

Could you believe me without? I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold like the chestnut bur; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass, that the guest leaves. Would this do just as well?

It often alarms father. He says death might occur and he has moulds of all the rest, but has no mould of me; but I noticed the quick wore off those things, in a few days, and forestall the dishonor. You will think no caprice of me.

You said “Dark.” I know the butterfly, and the lizard, and the orchis. Are not those _your_ countrymen?

I am happy to be your scholar, and will deserve the kindness I cannot repay.

If you truly consent, I recite now. Will you tell me my fault, frankly as to yourself, for I had rather wince than die. Men do not call the surgeon to commend the bone, but to set it, sir, and fracture within is more critical. And for this, preceptor, I shall bring you obedience, the blossom from my garden, and every gratitude I know.

Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that. My business is circumference. An ignorance, not of customs, but if caught with the dawn, or the sunset see me, myself the only kangaroo among the beauty, sir, if you please, it afflicts me, and I thought that instruction would take it away.

Because you have much business, beside the growth of me, you will appoint, yourself, how often I shall come, without your inconvenience.

And if at any time you regret you received me, or I prove a different fabric to that you supposed, you must banish me.

When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.

You are true about the “perfection.” To-day makes Yesterday mean.

You spoke of “Pippa Passes.” I never heard anybody speak of “Pippa Passes” before. You see my posture is benighted.

To thank you baffles me. Are you perfectly powerful? Had I a pleasure you had not, I could delight to bring it.

YOUR SCHOLAR.

This was accompanied by this strong poem, with its breathless conclusion. The title is of my own giving:—

THE SAINTS’ REST

Of tribulation, these are they, Denoted by the white; The spangled gowns, a lesser rank Of victors designate.

All these did conquer; but the ones Who overcame most times, Wear nothing commoner than snow, No ornaments but palms.

“Surrender” is a sort unknown On this superior soil; “Defeat” an outgrown anguish, Remembered as the mile

Our panting ancle barely passed When night devoured the road; But we stood whispering in the house, And all we said, was “Saved!”

[Note by the writer of the verses.] I spelled ankle wrong.

It would seem that at first I tried a little—a very little—to lead her in the direction of rules and traditions; but I fear it was only perfunctory, and that she interested me more in her—so to speak—unregenerate condition. Still, she recognizes the endeavor. In this case, as will be seen, I called her attention to the fact that while she took pains to correct the spelling of a word, she was utterly careless of greater irregularities. It will be seen by her answer that with her usual naïve adroitness she turns my point:—

DEAR FRIEND,—Are these more orderly? I thank you for the truth.

I had no monarch in my life, and cannot rule myself; and when I try to organize, my little force explodes and leaves me bare and charred.

I think you called me “wayward.” Will you help me improve?

I suppose the pride that stops the breath, in the core of woods, is not of ourself.

You say I confess the little mistake, and omit the large. Because I can see orthography; but the ignorance out of sight is my preceptor’s charge.

Of “shunning men and women,” they talk of hallowed things, aloud, and embarrass my dog. He and I don’t object to them, if they’ll exist their side. I think Carlo would please you. He is dumb, and brave. I think you would like the chestnut tree I met in my walk. It hit my notice suddenly, and I thought the skies were in blossom.

Then there’s a noiseless noise in the orchard that I let persons hear.

You told me in one letter you could not come to see me “now,” and I made no answer; not because I had none, but did not think myself the price that you should come so far.

I do not ask so large a pleasure, lest you might deny me.

You say, “Beyond your knowledge.” You would not jest with me, because I believe you; but, preceptor, you cannot mean it?

All men say “What” to me, but I thought it a fashion.

When much in the woods, as a little girl, I was told that the snake would bite me, that I might pick a poisonous flower, or goblins kidnap me; but I went along and met no one but angels, who were far shyer of me than I could be of them, so I haven’t that confidence in fraud which many exercise.

I shall observe your precept, though I don’t understand it, always.

I marked a line in one verse, because I met it after I made it, and never consciously touch a paint mixed by another person.

I do not let go it, because it is mine. Have you the portrait of Mrs. Browning?

Persons sent me three. If you had none, will you have mine?

YOUR SCHOLAR.

A month or two after this I entered the volunteer army of the Civil War, and must have written to her during the winter of 1862-63 from South Carolina or Florida, for the following reached me in camp:—

AMHERST.

DEAR FRIEND,—I did not deem that planetary forces annulled, but suffered an exchange of territory, or world.