Part 21

“The man that is to hold forth to-day is what my wife scolds me for calling ‘one of those higher law devils,’” he began by saying. “He is of the opinion that the law, forbidding slavery and denying rights to the masters of the slaves and all that, ought to set aside the Constitution and the laws made by better men and wiser heads than his. He’d override them all, if he could. I’ve nothing to say against a man’s having his own notions on that, or any other subject, but if he’s a minister of the gospel, he ought to preach the truth he finds in the Bible, and keep his confounded politics out of the pulpit.”

He leaned forward to flick a fly from the sleek horse with his whip.

“I’ve been given to understand that he doesn’t like to see me and some others of the same stripe in church when he preaches for us. I pay no attention to that. If he, or any others of his damnable way of thinking, imagine that I’m to be kept out of the church in which the Pierces owned a pew before this man and his crew were ever thought of, he’ll find himself mistaken. That’s all there is about it!”

It was worth seeing, after hearing this, the sturdy old representative of the Puritans, sitting bolt upright in the quaint box-pew where his forbears had worshipped the God of battles over a century before, and keeping what he called his “weather eye” upon the suspected expounder of the gospel of peace. The obnoxious occupant of the ancient and honorable pulpit was, to my notion, an amiable and inoffensive individual. He preached well, and with never an allusion to “higher law.” Yet Uncle Lewis kept watch and ward throughout the service. I could easily believe that he would have arisen to his feet and challenged audibly any approach to the forbidden territory.

The day and scene were recalled forcibly to my memory by a visit paid to my Newark home in 1864 by Francis Pierce, the protestant’s oldest son, on his way home from Washington. He was one of a committee of Dorchester citizens sent to the Capital to look after the welfare of Massachusetts troops called into the field by a Republican President.

The wife of the head of the Pierce homestead was one of the loveliest women ever brought into a world where saints are out of place. Near her lived an old widow, who was a proverb for captiousness and wrongheadedness. I never heard her say a kind or charitable word of neighbor or friend, until she astounded me one day by breaking out into a eulogy upon Aunt Pierce and Cousin Melissa, Francis’s wife:

“We read in the Scriptures that God is love. I allers think of them two women when I hear that text. It might be said of both of ’em: they are jest _love_—through an’ through!”

I carried the story to the blesséd pair, you may be sure. Whereupon, my aunt smiled compassionately.

“Poor old lady! People who don’t know how much trouble she has had, are hard upon her. We can’t judge one another unless we know all sides of a question. She is greatly to be pitied.”

And Cousin Melissa, in the gentle tone she might have learned from her beloved mother-in-law—“I always think that nobody is cross unless she is unhappy.”

_Aurora Leigh_ had not been written then. If it had been, neither of the white-souled dears would have read a word of it. Yet Mrs. Browning put this into the mouth of her heroine:

“The dear Christ comfort you! You must have been most miserable To be so cruel!”

The old house was a never-ending delight to me. It was built in 1640 (see Chapter I), ten years after the good ship _Mary and John_ brought over from Plymouth the Massachusetts Bay Colony, landing her passengers in Boston. Robert Pierce (or Percie) was, although a blood connection of the Northumberland Percies, the younger son of a younger son, and so far “out of the running” for title or fortune on that account, that he sought a home and livelihood in the New World.

My ancestress, Ann Greenaway, whose tedious voyage from England to Massachusetts was beguiled by her courtship and marriage to stalwart “Robert of Dorchester,” bore him many robust sons and “capable,” if not fair daughters, dying at last in the Dorchester homestead at the ripe age of one hundred and four.

From her the long line of descendants may have inherited the stout constitutions and stouter hearts that gave and kept for them a place in every community in which they have taken root.

The story of the Pierce Homestead is told in _Some Colonial Homesteads_ more at length than I can give it here.

The Virginia cousin was cordially welcomed to the cradle of her foremothers, and a warm attachment grew up between me and each member of the two households. My cousin Francis had built a modern house upon a corner of the homestead grounds, and I was as happily at home there as in the original nest.

Another adopted home—and in which I spent more time than in all the rest put together—was that of my cousin, Mrs. Long, “the prettiest of the three Lizzies” referred to in one of my letters. Her mother, my father’s favorite relative, had died since my last visit to Boston. Her daughter was married at her death-bed. She was a beautiful and intelligent woman, wedded to a man of congenial tastes who adored her. The intimacy of this one of our Yankee cousins and ourselves began before Mea and I had ever seen her. My sister and “Lizzie” were diligent correspondents from their school-days. To a chance remark of mine relative to their letters, I owe one of the most stable friendships that has blessed my life.

We sisters were in the school-room at recess one day when I was fourteen, Mea sixteen. I was preparing a French exercise for M. Guillet, Mea writing to Boston. We had the room to ourselves for the time. My sister looked up from her paper to say:

“What shall I say to Lizzie for you?”

“Give her my love, and tell her to provide me with a correspondent as charming as herself.”

In her reply Lizzie begged leave to introduce a particular friend of her own, “intelligent and lovable—altogether interesting, in fact.” This friend had heard her talk of her Southern cousins and wished to know them; but I must write the first letter. I caught at the suggestion of what commended itself to me as adventure, and it was an epistolary age. Letters long and numerous, filled with details and disquisitions, held the place usurped by telephone, telegraph, and post-cards. We had time to write, and considered that we could not put it to a better purpose. So the next letter from my sister to my cousin contained a four-pager from me, addressed to “Quelqu’une.” I gave fancy free play in conversing with the unknown, writing more nonsense than sober reason. I set her in the chair opposite mine, and discoursed _at_ her of “divers sayings.” If not

“Of ships and shoes and sealing-wax And cabbages and kings”—

of wars and rumors of wars, and school duties, and current literature.

In due time I had a reply in like strain, but to my consternation, written in a man’s hand, and signed “Quelqu’un.” He apologized respectfully for the ambiguous terms of the introduction that had led me into a mistake as to his sex, and hoped that the silver that was beginning to stipple his dark hair would guarantee the propriety of a continued correspondence.

“Time was,” he mused, “when I could conjugate _Amo_ in all its moods and tenses. Now I get no further than _Amabam_, and am constrained to confess myself in the tense at which I halt.”

We had written to one another once a month for two years before the sight of a note to Lizzie tore the mask from the face of my graybeard mentor, and confirmed my father’s suspicions as to his identity with Ossian Ashley, the husband of Aunt Harriet’s elder daughter. The next visit I paid to Boston brought us together in the intimacy of the family circle. He never dropped the rôle of elderly, and as time rolled on, of brotherly friend. He was, at that date, perhaps thirty-five years of age, and a superb specimen of robust manhood. I have seldom beheld a handsomer man, and his port was kingly, even when he had passed his eightieth birthday. Although a busy man of affairs, he was a systematic student. His library might have been the work-shop of a professional _litterateur_; he was a regular contributor to several journals upon financial and literary topics, handling each with grace and strength. His translation of Victor Cherbuliez’s _Count Kosta_ was a marvellous rendering of the tone and sense of the original into elegant English. He was an excellent French and Latin scholar, and, when his son entered a German university, set himself, at sixty-odd, to study German, that he “might not shame the boy when he came home.”

Before that, he had removed to New York City, and engaged in business there as a railway stock-broker. He was, up to a few months prior to his death, President of the Wabash Railway, and maintained throughout his blameless and beneficent life, a reputation for probity, energy, and talent.

Peace to his knightly soul!

He was passing good to me that summer. In company with his wife, we drove, sailed, and visited steamships, Bunker Hill Monument, and other places of historic interest. In their society I made my first visit to the theatre, and attended concerts and lectures. He lent me books, and led me on to discuss them, then, and when I was at home. And this when he was building up his business, looking after various family interests, not strictly his own (he was forever lending a hand to somebody!), and studying late into the night, as if working for a university degree. I am told that such men are so rare in our time and country as to make this one of my heroes a phenomenon.

It is not marvellous that friendships like these, enjoyed when character and opinion were in forming, should have cultivated optimism that has withstood the shock and undermining of late disappointments. It may well be that I have not known another man who, with his fortune to found, a household to support, and a press of mental toil that would have exhausted the energies of the average student, would have kept up a correspondence with a child for the sake of pleasing and educating her, and carried it on out of affectionate interest in a provincial kinswoman.

Affection and genial sympathy, with whatever concerned me or mine, endured to the end. He was my husband’s warm friend, a second father to my children—always and everywhere, my ally.

My last sight of him, before he succumbed to lingering and mortal illness, is vividly present with me. We had dined with him and his wife, and said to ourselves as we had hundreds of times, that time had mellowed, without dimming her beauty, and made him magnificent. The word is none too strong to describe him, as he towered above me in the parting words exchanged in light-heartedness unchecked by any premonition that we might never chat and laugh together again this side of the Silent Sea. He was over six feet in height; his hair and flowing beard were silver-white; his fine eyes darker and brighter by contrast; his smile was as gentle and his repartee as ready as when he had jested with me in those bygone summers from which the glory has never faded for me.

My upturned face must have expressed something of what filled heart and thoughts, for he drew me up to him suddenly, and kissed me between the eyes. Then, with the laugh I knew so well, he held out his hand to my husband:

“You mustn’t be jealous, my dear fellow! I knew her a long time before you ever saw her. And such _good_ friends as we have been for—bless my soul!—can it be more than fifty years?”

Again I say: “God rest his knightly soul!” It is worth living to have known one such man, and to have had him for my “_good_ friend” for “more than fifty years.”

XXVIII

MY FIRST OPERA—“PETER PARLEY”—RACHEL AS “CAMILLE”—BAYARD TAYLOR—T. B. ALDRICH—G. P. MORRIS—MARIA CUMMINS—MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY

THE three weeks passed in New York on my way home were thronged with novel and enchanting “sensations.” I saw my first opera—_Masaniello_, and it was the début of Elise Henssler. The party of which I was a member included Caroline Cheeseboro, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, and Samuel Griswold Goodrich—“Peter Parley.” To my intense satisfaction, my seat was beside the kindly old gentleman.

Was not _Parley’s Magazine_ the first periodical I had ever read? And had not I devoured every book he had written, down to a set of popular biographies for which my father had subscribed as a gift to me on my eighteenth birthday? That I should, really and truly, be sitting at his side and hearing him speak, was a treat I could hardly wait until to-morrow to dilate upon in my home-diary letter. He was social and amusing, and, withal, intelligently appreciative of the music and actors. He rattled away jovially in the _entr’actes_ of other operas and personal traits of stage celebrities, theatrical, and operatic. He told me, too, of how he had been ridiculed for embarking upon a career his friends thought puerile and contemptible, when he issued the initial number of _Parley’s Magazine_. If I was secretly disappointed that his affection for his juvenile constituency was more perfunctory than I had supposed from his writings, I smothered the feeling as disloyal, and would be nothing short of charmed.

I wrote to my mother next day that he was “a nice, friendly old gentleman, but impressed me as one who had outlived his enthusiasms.” If I had put the truth into downright English, I should have said that the circumstance that he was enshrined in thousands of young hearts as the aged man with a sore foot propped upon a cushion, and whose big heart was a fountain of love, and his brain a store-house of tales garnered for their delectation—was of minor importance to the profit popularity had brought him. I was yet new to the world’s ways and estimate of values.

The next night I saw Rachel in _Les Horaces_. I had never seen really great acting before. I had, however, read Charlotte Brontë’s incomparable portraiture, in _Villette_, of the queen of the modern stage. Having no language of my own that could depict what was done before my eyes, and uttered to my rapt soul, I drew upon obedient memory. Until that moment I had not known how faithful memory could be. In the breathless excitement of the last act of the tragedy, every word was laid ready to my hand. I seemed to read, with my subconscious perceptions, lines of palpitating light, the while my bodily sight lost not a gesture or look of the stricken tigress:

“An inordinate will, convulsing a perishing mortal frame, bent it to battle with doom and death; fought every inch of ground, sold every drop of blood; resisted to the last the rape of every faculty; _would_ see, _would_ hear, _would_ breathe, _would_ live, up to, within, well-nigh _beyond_ the moment when Death says to all sense and all being—‘Thus far and no farther!’”

I saw others—some said as great actors—in after years. Among them, Ristori. I do not think it was because I had seen none of them before the _Vashti_ of Charlotte Brontë’s impassioned periods flashed upon my unaccustomed sight, that I still hold her impersonation of Camille in _Les Horaces_ to be the grandest triumph of the tragedian’s art mine eyes have ever witnessed. Ristori was always the gentlewoman, born and reared, in whatever rôle she assumed. Rachel—and again I betake myself to the weird word-painting:

“Evil forces bore her through the tragedy; kept up her feeble strength.... They wrote ‘HELL’ on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate, she stood.”

I fancy that I must have been whispering the words as I gathered up my wraps and followed my companions out of the box. I recollect that one or two persons stared curiously at me. In the _foyer_ I was introduced to some strangers, and went through certain civil forms of speech. I did not recollect names or faces when we got back to the hotel. After I was in bed, I could not sleep for hours. But one other actor has ever wrought so mightily upon nerves and imagination. When I was forty years older I was ill for forty-eight hours after seeing Salvini as Othello.

During this memorable stay in New York I met Bayard Taylor. At the conclusion of his first call, I rushed to my desk and wrote to my sister:

“He has a port like Jove.

“‘Nature might stand up And say to all the world: “‘This is a MAN!’”’”

For once my ideal did not transcend the reality. Would that I could say it of all my dream-heroes and heroines! At his second call, Mr. Taylor was accompanied by Richard Henry Stoddard. At his first, he brought Charles Frederick Briggs, journalist and author, whose best-known book, _Harry Franco_, I had read and liked. I met him but once. Mr. Taylor honored me with his friendship until his lamented death. My recollections of him are all pleasant.

We met seldom, but our relations were cordial; the renewal of personal association was ever that of friends who liked and understood each other. I reckoned it a favor that honored me, that his widow accepted me as her husband’s old acquaintance, and that his memory has drawn us together in bonds of affectionate regard.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was then (in 1855) a mere stripling, yet already famous as the author of _Babie Bell_ and _Elsinore_, poems that would have immortalized him had he not written another line. I came to know him well during my Northern sojourn. His charming personality won hearts as inevitably as his genius commanded admiration. Halleck’s hackneyed eulogy of his early friend might be applied, and without dissent, to the best-belovéd of our later poets. To know him was to love him. The magnetism of the rarely-sweet smile, the frank sincerity of his greeting, the direct appeal of the clear eyes to the brother-heart which, he took for granted, beat responsive to his, were irresistible, even to the casual acquaintance. His letters were simply bewitching—as when I wrote to him after each of us had grown children, asking if he would give my youngest daughter the autograph she coveted from his hand.

He began by begging me to ask him, the next time I wrote, for something that he _could_ do, not for what was impossible for him to grant. He had laid it down as a rule, not to be broken under any temptation, whatsoever, that he would never give his autograph.

“If I could make an exception in the present case, you know how gladly I would do it, only to prove that I am unalterably your friend,

“THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH.”

He graced whatever he touched, and made the commonplace poetic. The ineffable tenderness and purity of his verse were the atmosphere in which the man lived and moved and breathed. The mystic afflatus of the born poet clothed him, as with a garment.

George P. Morris I met again and again. With the frank conceit, so permeated with the amiability and naïveté of the veteran songster, that it offended nobody, he told me how Braham had sung _Woodman, Spare That Tree_, before Queen Victoria, at her special request, and that _Jenny Marsh of Cherry Valley_ was more of an accepted classic than _Roy’s Wife of Aldivalloch_. He narrated, too, the thrilling effect produced upon an audience in New York or Philadelphia by the singing for the first time in public of _Near the Rock Where Drooped the Willow_, and smiled benignantly on hearing that it was a favorite ballad in our home. He was then associated with N. P. Willis in the editorship of _The New York Mirror_, and agreed fully with me that it had not its peer among American literary periodicals.

My mother had taken it for years. We had a shelf full of the bound volumes at home. I have some of them in my own library, and twice or three times in the year, have a rainy afternoon-revel over the yellowed, brittle pages mottled with the mysterious, umber thumbmarks of Time.

Colonel Morris’s partner, Nathaniel Parker Willis, who had not yet taken to writing out the name at full length, was at his country-seat of “Idlewild.” He was ten years older when I saw him last, and under circumstances that took the sting from regret that I had not met him when life was fresh and faiths were easily confirmed.

While in Dorchester I had enjoyed improving my acquaintanceship with Maria Cummins. Encyclopædias register her briefly as “An American novelist. She wrote _The Lamplighter_.” In 1855, no other woman writer was so prominently before the reading public. _The Lamplighter_ was in every home, and gossip of the personality of the author was seized upon greedily by press and readers. Meeting Augusta Evans, of _Rutledge_ and _St. Elmo_ and _Beulah_, four years thereafter, I was forcibly reminded of my Dorchester friend, albeit they belonged to totally different schools of literature. Both were quietly refined in manner and speech, and incredibly unspoiled by the flood of popular favor that had taken each by surprise. Alike, too, was the warmth of cordiality with which both greeted me, a stranger, whom they might never meet again.

An amusing incident connected with one of Maria Cummins’s visits broke down any lingering trace of strangerhood. She was to take tea at the house of my cousin, Francis Pierce. I was sitting by the window of the drawing-room, awaiting her arrival and gazing at the panorama of Boston Bay and the intervening hills, when an old lady, a relative-in-law of “Cousin Melissa,” stole in. She was over eighty, and so pathetically alone in the lower world that Melissa—the personation of Charity, which is Love—had granted her home and care for several years. She had donned her best cap and gown; as she crept up to me, she glanced nervously from side to side, and her withered hands chafed one another in agitation she could not conceal.

“I say, dearie,” she began, in a whisper, bending down to my face, “would you mind if I was to sit in the corner over there”—nodding toward the back parlor—“and listen to your talk after Miss Cummins comes? I won’t make the least mite of noise. I am an old woman. I never had a chance to hear two _actresses_ talk before, and I may never have another.”

I consented, laughingly, and she took up her position just in time to escape being seen by the incoming guest. We chatted away cheerily at our far window, watching the sunset as it crimsoned the bay and faded languidly into warm gray.

“Summer sunsets are associated in my mind, in a dreamy way, with the tinkle of cow-bells,” observed my companion, and went on to tell how, as a child, living in Salem, she used to watch the long lines of cows coming in from the meadows at evening, and how musically the tinkle of many bells blended with other sunset sounds.

“I have the same association with my Virginia home,” I answered. “So had Gray with Stoke Pogis. But _his_ herd lowed as it wound slowly over the lea.”

“Perhaps English cows are hungrier than ours,” Miss Cummins followed, in like strain. “I prefer the chiming bells.”

We dropped into more serious talk after that. The unseen listener carried off, up-stairs, when she stole out, like my little gray ghost, but one impression of the “actresses’” confabulation. Cousin Melissa told me of it next day. The old lady was grievously disappointed. We had talked of nothing but cows and cow-bells, and cows coming home hungry for supper, and such stuff. “For all the world as if they had lived on a dairy-farm all their days!”

I supped with Miss Cummins and her widowed mother a day or so later, and we made merry together over the poor crone’s chagrin.