Chapter 7

Cooper and His Friends

In that cheerless precinct of New York City to which still clings the name St. John's Park, though there has been no park there this half-century,--in Beach Street, a dozen or perhaps twenty steps from Hudson Street, there stands a house that could not fail to attract the attention of an observant passer-by. A brick building, its architectural features suggest roomy attractiveness--a condition little sought after in these days when the value of every inch of ground calls for compactness regardless of beauty of appearance. One looking at this building and given to sentiment might argue that it is strongly reminiscent of a human being who had once been vigorous and had made a considerable show in the world of fashion and pride, but who had sunk to poverty and decrepitude. For the carved window-cases are hacked and beaten away, the wrought-iron railings are twisted and rusty, the marble steps are cracked and crumbling, the high ceilings with their heavy and ornate mouldings are seamed and discolored, and the massive oaken doors are cracked by many a rusty nail driven into them, holding ragged and worn-out garments. Yet even in its age and neglect are found traces of its primal sturdy and artistic proportions.

In the year 1821, this house was the home of James Fenimore Cooper. His first book, _Precaution_, had failed utterly. His second book, _The Spy_, had been prodigiously successful, when in this year he went to New York to live in what was then the fashionable district of St. John's Park. He was thirty-one years old, had lived at Cooperstown, studied at Yale, shipped as a sailor before the mast, made voyages to England and Spain, been appointed midshipman, and seen service on Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain, had resigned his commission, and had married Augusta de Lancey at Heathcote Hill Manor, Mamaroneck. After the birth of his daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, who became a writer of rural sketches, he settled down in Westchester County to live the life of a country gentleman. He might have remained there all his days but that one day he got hold of a particularly stupid book of English life, and was so bored by it that it forced from him the exclamation that he could write a better himself! Which remark being interpreted literally by his wife, there was nothing for the country gentleman but to make good his boast. So he wrote a dull and stupid story which even his friends had difficulty in reading to the end, and then, doubtless finding writing more agreeable than farming, wrote another that destined him evermore to a literary life.

This much of Cooper's life was behind him when he moved into the Beach Street house. In this home he wrote _The Pioneers_, first of the famous Leatherstocking Tales and, too, _The Pilot_.

In the New York of that day there was one place where he loved to go for a quiet dinner and discussion with the literary friends whom he quickly gathered around him. This was the chief hostelry of the day, the City Hotel, which stood close by where Wall Street runs into Broadway. It was at one of these dinners that he met James A. Hillhouse, who, though he had already written _The Judgment_ and was recognized as a poet, was then engaged in mercantile pursuits in the city; but was very soon to make a home in New Haven and remain there during the rest of his life. Hillhouse was not a regular diner with Cooper, but he introduced there a friend who became much more regular in his attendance. Samuel Woodworth was even then shouldering aside adversity with intermittent success. It was his habit to walk briskly up from his printing office at the foot of Wall Street, very much in the manner of a man having an imperative appointment. Four years before Cooper came to town, on a very hot summer day, Woodworth had walked in this same eager manner to his house farther up-town in Duane Street, and there, drinking from a pump before his door, had said: "I'd like to have a drink to-day from the old bucket that hung in my father's well." Whereupon his kindly wife hinted that the old bucket of his remembrance would make a good subject for a poem--a hint that within the hour took the form of _The Old Oaken Bucket_, a pastoral poem well remembered and much sung, though many another of his, many an operetta, and even the historical romance, _The Champion of Freedom_, have faded from memory.

At these dinners, when Cooper sat with his friends, Woodworth and Morris held the first discussions of the plans for _The Mirror_, which was started in 1823, but from which the inconstant Woodworth soon retired.

On more than one occasion one of the dinner party was Richard Henry Dana, a founder of the _North American Review_ and the friend of Bryant. The City Hotel was quite convenient for him, for he had made a sort of headquarters in the place of Wiley, the publisher, around the corner in Wall Street by New Street. At that time he issued from Wiley's shop _The Idle Man_, that literary publication which scarcely lived long enough to include his novels, _Tom Thornton_ and _Paul Felton_, and some contributions from Washington Allston and Bryant.

Many a good idea came from the meetings at the City Hotel, but possibly none more felicitous than that of the Bread-and-Cheese Club. This remained so long in the germ that the realization seemed far off, but finally, in 1824, began the holding of its fortnightly meetings in Washington Hall--afterwards swept away to give place to the Stewart Building at Broadway and Reade Street. The club derived its name from Cooper's conceit of having candidates balloted for with bread and cheese, a bit of bread favoring election and cheese deciding against it.

As Cooper had in the main originated the club, he was the leading spirit around whom gathered Halleck and Bryant, Percival, Professor Renwick, Dr. J.W. Francis, and all the writers of the day. An enthusiastic member was Philip Hone, who had just retired from business and bought a house at 235 Broadway opposite the park, a site considered a good way up-town for a residence. His diary, which in after years led him to be called the Pepys of America, was commenced in this house, but the greater part was written at his residence of later date, at the southwest corner of Broadway and Great Jones Street.

Gulian C. Verplanck was a member too. At the time he occupied a professorship in the General Theological Seminary. From one of the meetings he walked down Broadway and through Wall Street past the house, near Broad Street, where he was born, discussing with Bryant and Robert C. Sands an early suggestion of the _Talisman_ magazine, which was not to ripen into an accomplished fact for a good three years. On this same walk, too, he took part while Bryant and Sands discussed plans for the _Atlantic Monthly_, which Sands established the next year.

But writers were not the only members of the Bread-and-Cheese Club. There were scholars and professional men, and often there were statesmen and men of national distinction as guests. But as Cooper was its leading spirit, when he left for his trip abroad the club went to pieces. He started in 1825 on his foreign travels, and at the time of his going was living at 345 Greenwich Street, where he had finished work on _The Last of the Mohicans_.

In the year after his going there was a gala night at the Lafayette Theatre, when _The Spy_ was enacted. The Lafayette was the largest theatre then. Upon its site in West Broadway near Canal Street St. Alphonsus's Church now stands. To that performance came from up-State Enoch Crosby, who was said to be the original Spy, and when he appeared in a box with some friends the audience gave him a thunderous ovation.

Cooper returned from abroad in 1833, having added _The Prairie_, _The Red Rover_, _The Water Witch_, and _The Bravo_ to his list of published books, and went to live in Bleecker Street, two blocks from Broadway, near Thompson Street. This was a select neighborhood then of pretty, irregular brick dwellings. The house is there yet, but the neighborhood is no longer elegant. Italian merchants, unkempt in appearance, carry on meagre and uncertain kinds of business, and Cooper's old house is so decorated with signs inside and out as to be picturesque only for its dinginess and disorder. Cooper did not live there long, for he soon moved to Broadway at Prince Street, into a house that later gave way to Niblo's Garden, and there he completed work on the volumes covering his stay in Europe, under the titles _Sketches in Switzerland_ and _Gleanings in Europe_. But he made no very long stay on Broadway, for he moved again, this time to St. Mark's Place, a few doors from Third Avenue, into an unpretentious brick house of three stories that is there still. There he wrote _Homeward Bound_ and began in earnest that fierce combat with his critics which was to last to the end of his days and leave many a regret that he had not been a more even-tempered man. From this house he went to Cooperstown, which became his final home.

At the time that Cooper lived in New York there walked along Broadway, between Canal Street and the Chapel of St. Paul's, on almost every pleasant afternoon, a man who in appearance was a veritable Hamlet. His garb was a customary suit of solemn black, and his eyes sought the ground as he moved with pensive step. This was McDonald Clarke, whose eccentric appearance and acts and whose melancholy verses gave him the name of The Mad Poet.

If Broadway was his walk of an afternoon, Park Row was his haunt by night; and Windust's place, a door or two below the Park Theatre (literally below it, for it was beneath the sidewalk), was his centring point.

The resort of Edward Windust was not an old place, but a famous one. It was opened in 1824 and lasted only until 1837, when the proprietor thought himself cramped in space and opportunity and, moving away to seek a larger field, found failure. It was the actors' museum of the city. Its walls were lined with reminders of the stage: playbills, and swords that had seen the service of savage mimic wars; pictures, and frames of clippings, and bits of the wardrobes of kings and queens who had strutted their brief hour and passed away. It was the nightly gathering point of such actors as were in town, such writers, such wits, such gallant gentlemen. Edmund Kean and the Wallacks, Harry Placide and Cooper, Jack Scott, Mitchell, Brown, and Junius Brutus Booth were frequenters, with Fitz-Greene Halleck, Willis, Morris, and the rest, who nightly crowded the tier of stalls that ranged along one side of the room, making them resound with gay and brilliant talk.

In Windust's, too, sat McDonald Clarke in gloomy majesty night after night. There he formed among many others the acquaintance of Mordecai M. Noah, journalist and playwright, who had been Consul at Tunis and who in the years to come was to start several unsuccessful papers, until in 1843 he was to publish the _Sunday Times and Messenger_, which continued for more than half a century.

From Windust's McDonald Clarke often wandered out into the City Hall Park over the way, and sat there through many a long summer night dreaming over his _Elixir of Moonshine_, or, with the memory of his afternoon walks upon him, composing lines for his _Afara, or the Belles of Broadway_, and many another melancholy verse. Often he sat there until daybreak, then went on into Broadway again. He had a favorite early-morning stand on the Fulton Street side of St. Paul's Churchyard, and there, an hour before the town was stirring, soliloquized as he looked through the railings at the brown tombstones.

On these same mornings, but a few hours later, another writer looked down on the same faded tombstones, for Ray Palmer was the teacher of a young ladies' school down Fulton Street beyond Broadway. He was young then, in his twenty-second year, in ill-health, and suffering under discouragements that would have been unendurable to a weaker-dispositioned man. As he looked from the school window into the churchyard he wrote a hymn which remained in his desk for several years, until it was published in quite an accidental manner by Dr. Lowell Mason, when he needed material for a book of church music which he had compiled. In a few years this hymn, _My Faith Looks Up to Thee_, was to be sung oftener than any other American hymn.

The sights and the sounds of the busy city that were an inspiration to Ray Palmer always sent The Mad Poet in another direction,--on up Broadway to Leonard Street, turning down there two short blocks to Chapel Street, to the house where at that time he made his home. It was a dreary enough street and a dismal enough upper room, but there was a narrow window where the poet could look over the housetops in the midnight hour and watch the stars that he seemed ever to hold converse with. Or, if it was in the early evening, he had but to lean forward from his window to see the people going into the Italian Opera House on the next corner. The Italian Opera House had a great deal of attraction for The Mad Poet. Not that he went there often to attend the performances, but he liked to inspect it from his window height as though he caught a glimpse of the sorrows and disappointments connected with it. He had moved into the house in the year 1833--the year that the opera house was opened after it had been built for a company headed by Lorenzo Da Ponte.

This Da Ponte had come to America in 1805, having a record as an Italian dramatist, who had furnished libretti for Mozart's operas, _Don Giovanni_ and _Nozze di Figaro_. He was professor in Columbia College when he matured an idea for establishing a home for Italian opera in New York, a plan which led to the building of the opera house near which The Mad Poet lived. It opened splendidly with the singers of the Cavalier di Rivafinoli, but a short season ended Lorenzo Da Ponte's hopes.

If The Mad Poet from his housetop could have seen what the next few years had in store, he would have beheld the aged dramatist dying at his home in Spring Street, close to Broadway, his body followed from there by his mourning friends--Halleck and Verplanck and Woodworth and some few others,--followed to the churchyard surrounding the nearby St. Patrick's Church; he would have seen the mark above the grave crumbling away, leaving nothing to point the spot where Da Ponte lay buried with his dreams and his hopes. But no inspiration hinted any of these things to McDonald Clarke, and once, in speaking of Da Ponte, he said that there at least was a man who had lived long unrewarded but had attained his ambition at last.

For nine years after The Mad Poet went to the Chapel Street house his Broadway walks continued, his dress each year growing more shabby, his eye more downcast, and his verse more melancholy. Then one day he was seen close by his favorite stand near the Churchyard of St. Paul's, acting so strangely that he was thought to be intoxicated. Next morning he awoke to find himself a prisoner in a vagrant cell, and the shock to his sensitive nature sent him, a madman indeed, to the Blackwell's Island Asylum, where in a few days he died.

Years after, the author of _Glimpses of Home Life_, Emma C. Embury, whose home was in Brooklyn, told of a knoll in Greenwood Cemetery by the side of a little lake where the oak-trees shaded a modest tomb on which there were some lines of verse. They were lines written by McDonald Clarke. The tomb is there yet, still shaded by oaks that have grown sturdier with the passing years, and the grave by the lake is the grave of The Mad Poet.