Part 15

Saturday night we passed Holyhead, Sunday coasted Ireland, and passed the ‘Asia’ steamer with all her sails set. This day week we are to be in port, spite of head wind.

Sunday, November 7.

A very Sunday-like Sunday indeed: fair wind and bright weather; church service in the chief cabin, read by the surgeon, with sermon by the Rev. Dr. Cook, of the Presbyterian Established Church in Quebec: the lieutenant in his uniform, and some ten or twelve broad-chested sailors, in their blue woollen shirts, occupying the end of the cabin, aft--fine fellows as need be seen. Since then, a deal of promenading on the quarter-deck. I got sick of the publicities, however, about two o’clock, and come down to my cabin to scribble. Lowell, who is on board, is very friendly indeed. Thackeray and I also get on.

We have on board a Dragoon officer and a young Engineer officer, bound for Bermuda; two American medical students; a young half-English New York candidate for orders; a Manchester youth, on his first trip to New Orleans; a Cambridge travelling bachelor, with his brother, an Oxford man, knocked up with work in the University crew, going to Montreal; a Comptroller of the Customs in Halifax, and perhaps a well-to-do Halifax merchant, both well-bred Englishmen; a south country merchant, also English, with an American wife; a Boston chronometer maker; a Virginian with wife, son, and little niece. Sundry American brokers, &c. &c., make up our party.

November 8.

No sun to-day, and no observation; but we are running thirteen knots; and the sea is a very gentle beast, and hardly rocks at all, and we are all good-humoured and hungry.

November 9.

The ship is plunging like a porpoise. Last night came on a sort of gale, with cloud and fog, and we moreover just off Cape Race, and, I believe, really running straight upon it, which, you know, is a great mass of cliff 300 or 400 feet high. However, we stopped and sounded, and stopped and sounded again, and changed our course southward, and were safe past before bedtime, but have been going slowly, with a strong head wind.

November 11.

Off the coast of Nova Scotia. Last night at one o’clock we got to Halifax. We had a very noisy night of it--boxes going out and boxes coming in, and passengers ditto.

I have walked one lady about the deck for an hour, and talked half an hour to another, and another half-hour with Thackeray, who was laid up in his berth. I was called on deck to see the ‘Niagara’ steaming away eastward from Halifax, some eight miles to the south of us. I am perhaps a little sick of the amount of intimacy which enforces itself upon one under the circumstances of fellow-passengership. It is to be ended, however, to-morrow.

There was speechifying and toasting at dinner yesterday in the usual approved style. All our healths were drunk at the lunch-dinner. Thackeray, of course, was drunk; then Mr. Degen proposed Lowell, the American poet; and Lowell, in returning thanks, proposed the English poet--me!--and all the people stared at this extraordinary piece of information, and I made my very modest speech, &c. &c.

I have been interrupted by a discourse on the Fugitive Slave Law by a citizen of Hartford, Connecticut, who takes, _not_ the anti-slavery view, and affirms that the North is quite satisfied. The Lowells meantime are fervent Abolitionists.

Tremont House, Boston: Monday, November 15, 1852.

Here I am an established Bostonian. _Friday_ arrived at sunset; found Thackeray already at this hotel, and that I had been inquired for. Supped with Thackeray & Co., and went to bed.

_Saturday._--Lady Lyell takes me to the Ticknors; go to Dr. Howe’s office, close by here, and see him; presently in comes young Mr. Norton, and afterwards Mrs. Howe. Leave letters on the Appletons and Abbott Lawrences. In returning meet Norton, with whom I swear eternal friendship; he takes me and introduces me at the Athenæum, and at a Club, and we walk and talk till 2.30.

Then I dine at the hotel, at the ‘Ladies’ Ordinary,’ with Thackeray and the Lyells; then lionise with Thackeray and his friend Crowe through the streets, till it is time to go off to the railway, which at 6.45 carries me off to Concord, to Emerson. Mrs. Emerson is out, with her eldest girl. Old Mrs. Emerson, called ‘Madam,’ is sitting in the room--a small, benevolent-looking, large-eyed old lady, the original of Ralph Waldo.

_Sunday._--Loads of talk with Emerson all morning. Breakfast at eight displays two girls and a boy, the family. Dinner at 2.30. Walk with Emerson to a wood with a prettyish pool. Concord is very bare (so is the country in general); it is a small sort of village, almost entirely of wood houses, painted white, with Venetian blinds, green outside, with two white wooden churches--one with a stone façade of Doric columns, however. Emerson’s ancestor brought his congregation here from Gloucestershire (I think) in the year 1635.

There are some American elms, of a weeping kind, and sycamores, _i.e._ planes; but the wood is mostly pine--white pine and yellow pine--somewhat scrubby, occupying the tops of the low banks, and marshy hay land between, very brown now. A little brook runs through to the Concord river.

At 6.30, tea and Mr. Thoreau; and presently Mrs. Ellery Channing, Miss Channing, and others.

This morning I came away at a quarter to nine: a hard frost. To-day I have seen Norton, and called on Charles Sumner. To-morrow I am to dine with Norton, to meet Felton, the Greek Professor, at the Club; and the next day at his father’s, and to call on Longfellow, who called on me.

I like Boston. There is a sort of park, ‘the Common,’ with iron railings, and houses something like the Piccadilly row above the Green Park, only all residences without shops--one built by Governor Hancock, whose name is first in the Declaration of Independence, quite an old-fashioned George II. house; the others later, of red brick, with balustrading and carving, many of them. It is really very tolerably English in the town. The harbour is very pretty. It is like a very good sort of English country town in some respects.

People dine here at 2.30 regularly, and ask you to dine then. Fashionable dinners at five. At evening parties you are supposed to have had tea, and to want supper.

Alas! I have not seen a garden yet in Massachusetts. Emerson’s little girl, however, brought in some small ‘pensées,’ which she called ‘lady’s delights,’ and some other little things that did for flowers. Edith is a very nice child, and will be eleven next Monday. ‘When I was going to be nine years old I didn’t know how I should feel.’ ‘Well, and how did you feel?’ ‘Oh, I didn’t feel anyhow.’

I had Abolition pretty well out with Emerson, with whom one can talk with pleasure on the subject. His view is in the direction of purchasing emancipation. I send a bit of bark from a birch in Emerson’s wood lot, the white or papyra birch, from which the Indians make canoes. I remember long years ago seeing these birches on a hill near Lebanon Springs, up which we children were taken to look out over a tract of country which we were told was Massachusetts.

November 19.

I am to settle at Cambridge next Tuesday. I suppose I shall by degrees find out the defects of the Yankee at home, but certainly they are very kind.

Here, in Boston, I am ‘the _celebrated_ author of “The Bothie,”’ a whole edition of which was printed and _sold_, they say, here.

Houses are sadly dear, one is told, both in Cambridge and Boston; and things in general are said to be expensive, meat and drink excepted. Drink, however, in the shape of wine and spirits, is actually forbidden. Temperance is established by law. Only those who have stocks on hand of their own can drink; a few sellers, whose licenses have not expired, can sell. But after that there will be no selling at all. This is called Maine Law, and is said to be of great benefit in the country places, crime being greatly reduced. Dr. Howe gives no wine; at Mr. Dwight’s there was sherry and Madeira, but hardly any was drunk: three very small glasses apiece by the gentlemen--by the ladies none. Wine and spirits are certainly not required where there is so much stimulant in the air; even tea and coffee may be well dispensed with. The best drink for the climate, I think, is cocoa.

November 21.

Yesterday Emerson gave a grand dinner, in honour of my poor self apparently, at the Tremont House, where were Longfellow, Hawthorne, Greenough the sculptor, Charles Sumner, Theodore Parker, Ellery Channing, Lowell, and five others--a very swell dinner, I assure you.

November 22.

I have been up and have called on Mr. Prescott and Mr. Winthrop. Cambridge is three miles from Boston, with omnibuses every quarter of an hour, and also a railway. The cold increases; snow is announced, but has not come yet here, though it has in most parts.

Cambridge: November 24.

Here I am settled at Cambridge in my own apartments, with all but my books about me: indoors and out-of-doors, north-west wind and hard frost.

To-morrow, which is Thanksgiving Day, the old Puritan substitute for Christmas Day, I have promised to go to church with the Nortons. The Congregationalists, Baptists, and Unitarians all unite for the day, in the Unitarian building.

A young lady, the other night, after I was introduced, told me she had had the pleasure of _looking_ at me (the celebrated author!) at a party a few nights before. The force of compliment could no further go. I very much doubt, however, whether the fact of my authorship has reached the serene nostrils of the Boston magnates, though Longfellow fully recognises the high merit of the Pastoral.

November 26.

In some respects this is a barren and shallow soil; but it is an immense thing to feel that you really are in all likelihood wanted, whereas in London one was wasted in occupying a place which some one else wished for. I shall send you an American edition of the poor old ‘Bothie.’ People here put it on their drawing-room tables, and think it innocent enough, which indeed, believe me, it really is: a little boyish, of course, but really childishly innocent. I read it nearly through the other morning, which I had not done since the time of its first appearance; but I had heard it alluded to so much, I thought it my duty to see what it was like.

Longfellow is a very good fellow; he gave us quite an English dinner yesterday. He had just received a present of grouse, pheasants, and milk-punch from some one he had been civil to, and issued immediately his invitations: Norton, Felton, Lowell, and me.

November 28.

Here I am with my first Anglo-American pupil, aged seventeen, at his first day’s work. He is a descendant of the old Governor Winthrop, of Cromwell’s times. He is to come three hours a day till July. But I should not wonder if before that he were across the Rocky Mountains, or filibustering in Cuba, or sowing other wild oats _à la jeune Américaine_. Here, however, in bodily form, to the extent of six foot one, he is, turning Greek into English, neither better nor worse, before me at the present moment. It is agreeable after a fashion to be at work again; and teaching Greek is a very _innocent_ trade at any rate--as innocent, I should think, as most.

Last night I went to tea at Mrs. ----’s. I like herself very much; not equally so some of her friends; they do the satirical and the sarcastic, and the ill-natured and the fastidious, and the intellectual and all that, for which one had better go back to London.

December 5.

This winter is extraordinarily mild: to-day a little hoar frost, but bright sunshine all the same. The difference here in general is, that there is bright daylight from 6½ A.M. to near 6 P.M., even now just before the shortest day. You know we are in the latitude of Rome.

Yesterday I walked, from three to six, towards the river Mystic; to-day across the river Charles (which is close here, running under the low bank of Cambridge), towards Brookline and Roxbury, which was rather pretty; but everything is sadly bare--no hedges, and not many trees. The only green trees now, of course, are the firs, which are much like the spruce firs in England. There is a sort of juniper, which grows high like a cypress, or even higher, and is pretty.

Yesterday I had a walk with James Lowell to a very pretty spot, Beaver Brook. Then I dined with him, his wife, and his father, a fine old minister, who is stone deaf, but talks to you. He began by saying that he was born an Englishman, _i.e._ before the end of the Revolution. Then he went on to say, ‘I have stood as near to George III. as to you now;’ ‘I saw Napoleon crowned Emperor;’ then, ‘Old men are apt to be garrulous, especially about themselves;’ ‘I saw the present Sultan ride through Constantinople on assuming the throne;’ and so on--all in a strong clear voice, and in perfect sentences, which you saw him making beforehand. And all one could do was to bow and look expressive, for he could only just hear when his son got up and shouted in his ear.

December 14.

I am to read a lecture here on English literature, gratis; but if I should read it two or three times after that, I may make it pay something worth speaking of. One lecture may be read as much as a hundred times. It is rather a distinction, though a barren one, to read it, as I shall, the first time here in Cambridge; at least the other lecturers in the same course are Professors, and it was thought it would make me known in College.

Look here at this little incident in illustration of manners and customs. I find, in the middle of my small breakfast, that there is no sugar, so I ring; no one comes, and I do without. About a quarter of an hour after comes the Irishwoman, and says, ‘Did ye want anything when ye rang? I was sorry I couldn’t come just then. I thought it was to take away, and I wasn’t through my breakfast. ‘I wasn’t through’ is the universal Yankee for ‘I hadn’t done.’ ‘Are you through?’ for ‘Have you done?’ continually occurs.

A school for boys or girls is what all the good advisers give as their best advice--Felton, Longfellow, G. Emerson. I am content to do this till I am forty, at any rate. I think often of the plan of joining somebody who is in the trade already. But this seems not after Yankee fashion; everybody is for himself. Mr. George Emerson’s school for girls is conducted entirely by himself, with lady-teachers under him.

Last night I met Miss Sedgwick, a vigorous-looking lady of fifty, perhaps. James Lowell, who has written the poems, is cousin to John Lowell, whose father founded the Lowell Institution for lectures. One of the family was the first setter up of manufactures here, and, as it were, founded the town of Lowell. There is a town Lawrence, called after Abbott Lawrence, in like manner.

I felt to-day as if I could be content to settle down here in America for good and all, very fairly indeed; there is less that is wrong here, on the whole, though less that is great. I was just reflecting that it is better to be out here, and be away from London; and yet sometimes when I was there, I thought it was dreadful to be torn away from what I was learning and feeling and seeing. Now it seems as if all my time there had been wrongly employed, and that it is an excellent thing to have got away. However, it is more perhaps what one escapes than what one gets.

Shall I tell you what an Old Hunker is?--a high-and-dry Tory; and Democrats are the Radicals, the party now victorious over the Whigs, who are the same as our Tories. Ticknor, Prescott, and Co. are Old Hunkers; Hawthorne is a Democrat; Emerson is a Free Soiler. If I were to be anything (on the Slavery question) I should be a Free Soiler, which only means that you won’t have any new Slave States. I wouldn’t interfere with existing Slave States, except to intimate that the central Government is ready to assist in any measure any Slave State will propose for getting rid of slavery; _i.e._ to give compensation. I believe the Fugitive Slave Law was a piece of truckling to the South--quite an unnecessary concession.

January 3, 1853.

There is no _stiffness_ here, I think. The ----s do the grand a little; and the ----s are exclusive, but not grand; and the Nortons are neither grand nor exclusive--very kind-hearted and good. Charles Norton is the kindest creature in the shape of a young man of twenty-five that ever befriended an emigrant stranger anywhere.

I am not _at all_ a distinguished literary man in some eyes here, remember; and as for poets, ‘there are four poets in Cambridge,’ said some one to me the other day--‘Mr. Longfellow, and you, and Mr. Batcheldor, and Mr. something else.’ I had, however, to send an autograph to Cincinnati; two hexameter verses, observe.

Written by A. H. Clough, for a reader at Cincinnati. Witness his hand and seal this 26th of December.

Ladies here usually carve and bring you things, even at great suppers; no man seems expected to carve for a lady, and they don’t get up when the ladies leave the dining-room, nor open the door, except casually. Only in omnibuses, and the cars--as they call railway trains--they expect you to give your place up; some, I believe, will even ask. The worst thing is the service. Servants are very indifferent--dirty, uninstructed Irish, who are very slow in learning to be clean, and very quick in learning to be independent, and ‘I’m as good as you’ in their manners.

Some people here do manage very nicely, but mostly there is the feeling that there is nobody to do things for you. A meal is rather a matter of business than of enjoyment. It is transacted. They don’t sit over it like rational beings; they do it like washing their hands, or as people dress who have got an engagement to be down to.

Last night I read my lecture, and it seems to have done very well. Afterwards I went to supper to James Lowell, and stayed there from 8.30 to 1 A.M. Thackeray came at ten; Longfellow, Dana, Quincy, Estes Howe, Felton, Fields, and another. Puns chiefly, but Dana is really amusing. Thackeray doesn’t sneer; he is really very sentimental; but he sees the silliness sentiment runs into, and so always tempers it by a little banter or ridicule. He is much farther into actual life than I am; I always feel that, but one can’t be two things at once, you know.

Here’s a story--Mr. Dana of himself. Mr. Dana lectures in a country town; walks home to sleep, after it, with the ‘President of the ---- Lyceum,’ a country farmer. Dead silence. Farmer: ‘Mr. Dana, I b’lieve you wrote a book once?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Waal, I never read it myself; my foaks have, though.’ Dead silence again: arrival home. The wife, an _in_valid (accented thus in America), as farmers’ wives mostly are, hasn’t been at lecture, and states her sorrow, &c. Farmer: ‘My dear! b’lieve you’ve read Mr. Dana’s book.’ Wife looks deadly blank, says at last, ‘She b’lieves she’s heard speak of it.’ They sit down, and the apples are brought in. A little black-eyed, sharp-looking, school-frequenting daughter comes in. Farmer: ‘Susan ’Liza! you’ve read Mr. Dana’s “Two Years before the Mast.”’ Susan ’Liza (quickly): ‘No, sir.’ Dead silence till bedtime.

Here are some stories which Webster told of his youth. His father was a small farmer in New Hampshire, and had helped one of his neighbours, who afterwards removed and went into the woods. Daniel was going in that direction to College, and his father told him to inquire after these people. He went, found them in a log hut, and said he would stop Sunday with them, to which they were agreeable. At supper-time the father of the family said to him that for the present they were living upon grass. And grass fried with lard did actually constitute supper, breakfast, dinner, and every meal; and, said Webster, ‘It wasn’t so bad either.’ At parting, the man said to him, ‘Well, Daniel, what are you going to be? A minister? they’re all hypocrites. A doctor? they’re all impostors; and lawyers, all cheats. No honest young man would be any of these trades. But there is a trade I can tell you of, by which you can make your fortune. There used to be one or two in it, but I don’t know of any in these parts now: you’d have it all to yourself. I don’t know how it’s done, but it’s by larning, someways. You’d best be a conjuror. When a man loses his cow, the conjuror tells him where it is; don’t know how; by larning tho’.’ ‘Which advice,’ said Webster, ‘might have materially changed my after life.’

Another story. Webster’s father had a neighbour who was an honest, well-behaved man, only given to drink. Once when drunk he took his rifle and shot two friendly Indians. The Indians demanded to have him given up, and the people put him in jail. But his friends thought it hard he should be hung for killing Indians, and they broke open the prison and sent him off to Canada. The Indians vowed they would be revenged on him all the same. He lived in Canada with his wife and children some time; but whether it was terror or conscience, at last he made up his mind and left them, and went to the Indians and said, ‘It was I killed your two chiefs; here am I, do what you please with me.’ So the Indians were astonished, and considered the matter, and said, ‘No, you shall be our chief.’ And there he remained with them the rest of his days.

January 8.

Snow and sleighing in full force. The omnibuses are all on runners in sleigh fashion; wheels are everywhere discarded.

January 10.

Thermometer down at 5° at sunset yesterday; so must, I think, have got down to -5° during the night.

For me, I was taken yesterday to the College chapel, where an eminent Unitarian preached on the parable of the prodigal son, or rather, _against_ the said parable. To be sure there _was_ joy, because it was so very uncommon and surprising a thing when a sinner repented. It was a thing that _very rarely indeed_ came to pass.

I sometimes think that my course is one that must be walked alone, and that it is altogether too unpleasant and poverty stricken for married happiness. I sometimes, when I have heard people here talk, for example, of Theodore Parker, as if he were the scum of the earth, think that it will not do to keep silence. I have no particular love for Theodore Parker; but he is so manifestly more right than the people who despise him, I cannot, I think, in right altogether remain silent and acquiesce. It looked to me as if orthodoxy (of the Unitarian kind) was as bad for me as any realler orthodoxy elsewhere.

Anecdotes of the old clergy here are very rife: they were quite an aristocracy, and could do as they pleased more than anyone else, which now nobody can at all. They were appointed for life, with fixed incomes; this is not the case so generally now. Religious opinions contrary to the orthodox Unitarianism are represented as much disliked here.

Mrs. ---- says Boston ladies suffer in their health through the endless trouble of keeping servants doing things properly and nicely; that the only way to live is to live rudely and simply. I think she is right. Ornament in America is a failure. As England stands to France, so America to England for ornamental things.

January 20.

I have just had a new pupil; he is a very good fellow and eager to learn, and a ‘senior,’ _i.e._ a fourth year student in the College. I am also going to write an article on the Oxford Commission in the ‘North American Review.’ Another book matter is, that Little & Brown, the head booksellers here, want me to help towards republishing Langhorne’s Plutarch. I am to have discretion to do it as I like, and $350 for the work.

My fancy at present is, if possible, to live here in a humble way, take a few pupils, and do booksellers’ work or lecture, and so make up an income. I think it will be less fatiguing and less hazardous than setting up a school, which any rumour of heterodoxy might upset. And I do think that I can teach Greek better than most Yankee Grecians.

January 29.