Part 13

I managed with some difficulty and scramble to get off a letter to you by yesterday’s post, which _ought_ to go by steamer from New York to-day, bringing my narrative up to our arrival here. We found Lowell on his verandah with his wife and friend, and sat there talking till ten. I am not the least disappointed with him, Henry Cowper notwithstanding. I have never met a more agreeable talker, and his kindness to me is quite unbounded. Then he has not a grain of vanity in his composition, but is as simple and truthful as the best kind of boy. The house is a wooden one, as four-fifths of the houses in New England are. It is roomy, airy, and furnished with quaint old heavy pieces, bureaus like ours, and solid heavy little mahogany tables, all dating from the last century. The plate in the same way is all of the Queen Anne shape, like your little tea-service and my grandmother’s milk jugs and tea-pots which George has. The plainness and simplicity of the living, too, is most attractive. We breakfast at 8.30, beginning with porridge, and following up with eggs, some hot dish, corn cakes, toast and fruit. Then there is no regular meal till six--a terribly late and fashionable dinner hour here, as the prevalent hour is two or three--and afterwards we have a cup of coffee and crackers (good plain biscuits) and a glass of toddy at ten. Miss Mabel and others have given us a desperate idea of the difficulties as to service, but they certainly do not exist in this establishment just now. The principal servant that we see is an Irish girl, Rose by name, who reminds me of one of Mrs. Cameron’s servants except that she is far more diligent. The ingenious way in which she hid away all my wardrobe in the ample cupboards and recesses of the bureau in my room was a perfect caution, and she whisks away my things and gets them beautifully washed, wholly refusing to allow me to pay for them. The parlour-maid is a little, slight, ladylike girl, who certainly is not a first-rate waiter, but then there is no need of one. The dinner is confined to one thing at a time--soup, sometimes fish, a joint, or chickens, and a sweet. The Professor opens his own wine at the table and passes it round, and very good it is, but one scarcely needs it in this climate. A cook whose acquaintance I have also made, and an Irishman who has been thirty years on the place in a roomy cottage, and attends to the cows, garden, and farm of thirty acres, complete the establishment. Mrs. Lowell, who is a very nice, quiet, and clever woman, is very fond of flowers, and manages to keep a few beds going about the house, and there are a number of very fine trees, so that though there is no pretence to the neatness and finish of English grounds and garden, the place has a thoroughly homely, cultivated atmosphere and look which is very attractive, and the whole town of Cambridge seems to be made up of just such houses. We have lost no time in lionising men and places. On Thursday we took the car into Boston and ascended the monument on Bunker’s Hill, 290 steps up a dark spiral staircase. Lowell had never been up it before, nor indeed has any native as far as I can find out. The view at the top repays you thoroughly for the grind with the thermometer at eighty in the shade. Boston Harbour, where the tea was thrown out of the English ships in 1775, and> the whole town and suburbs lie below you like a map, and are very striking. After descending we hunted up a number of people, including young Holmes, our Colonel, who was as charming as ever, absorbed in his law at which he is doing famously, and resolved in his first holiday to revisit England. He came out to dine, and fraternised immensely with R----, and with him a young Howells, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, whom Conway had brought to our house years ago, and I had entirely forgotten. However he is a very nice fellow, and I don’t think I betrayed my obliviousness. Next day, Friday, we had a long country drive in the morning through broad avenues lined with three fascinating wooden houses, each standing with plenty of elbow-room in its own grounds, up to a wooded hill from which we got a splendid view of the city. Then I went into Boston and called on the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, who is one of the best talkers I ever met, and quite worthy to be the Colonel’s father. He is one of Motley’s oldest friends, and deeply grieved, as all good men here, at his recall. His chief talk was of his memories of his English visits, and the folk he met, and so I find it with all the best men and women here. Notwithstanding the bitterness which our press created during the war, I am convinced that with a very little tact and judicious handling on our side the international relations may be easily made all we can wish as far as New England is concerned. Afterwards I sauntered about the town, looking at some good statues in their park (Boston Common), and letting the place sink into me. The Common is about the size, I should say, of Green Park, but of a regular shape. It lies on the side of a hill at the top of which are the State House and other public buildings and private houses. It is well wooded with fine American and English elms (pre-revolutionary, they say, but I don’t believe it. They are not used to our elms, and I doubt whether any of these are 100 years old) on the upper part and along the sides; the middle is a great playground for the boys, who are diligent there all day at base-ball, our rounders, which I should think must spoil the enjoyment of the place for ladies and children. However they can always take to the pretty gardens at the lower end, in which is a very fine equestrian statue of Washington, and one of Everett by Story, by no means fine in my opinion. How should it be, when he insisted on being taken with his arm right up in the air, his favourite attitude in speaking, and stands up in that attitude in ordinary buttoned frock coat and trousers? Everett has not been a trustworthy public man to my mind, and is simply nothing unless it is an orator, and I can’t say I think it wise to put him up there on the palpable stump. But we have made so many mistakes in our public statues that I suppose it must run in the blood. The best houses in the town, really charming residences, line the two sides and top of the Common, and fine stores the bottom. I have never seen a place I would so soon live in out of England as in one of these houses looking on to Boston Common. The old business town is being rebuilt just as London--red brick two or three story houses giving way everywhere to five or six stories of granite or stone. The town has as old and settled a look and feeling about it as any I know; but they have few old buildings, and I am afraid are going to pull down the most characteristic, the old State House, because it has ceased to be used for public purposes, and its removal will make a fine broad place and relieve the traffic of several narrow streets in the heart of the town. It will be a sad pity, and so unnecessary here, for they might carry it off bodily to any other site. You know how we have often heard, and wondered, scarce believing, of the raising bodily of the great hotels, etc., at Chicago. Well, suddenly, in Boston I came across a great market, three stories high (the upper part being occupied as houses) and 150 or 200 feet long, as big, say, as three houses in Grosvenor Square, which they were moving bodily back on rollers so as to widen the street. There were the wooden ways and the rollers, and the great block with all its marketing and living inhabitants lying on them, and already some twelve feet on its journey. It did not look any the worse for its journey unless it were in the foundations, where there were a few places which had been filled up, I saw, with new brickwork. The long pit twelve feet deep which has been left between the market and the street will now be turned into cellars, over which the new pavement will pass. On the Saturday we dined with the Saturday Club at 2.30 P.M., where were all the New England notables now in town. I sat on the right of Sumner, the State Senator, who was in the chair, with Boutwell, the Secretary of the Treasury, on my right, and Emerson on the other side of Sumner. So you may fancy how I enjoyed the sitting. Emerson is perfectly delightful: simple, wise, and full of humour and sunshine. The number of good Yankee stories I shall bring back unless they burst me will be a caution. Forbes, a great Boston merchant who owns an island seventy-two miles long off the coast close to Nantucket and Cape Cod, which you will find in the map, came up and claimed to have seen me for five minutes when I had the small-pox in 1863.

He knows J------ well, and insisted on carrying us off to his island that night, that we might attend a huge campmeeting on a neighbouring island on Sunday. So he drove up here with us and we packed--the dear Professor agreeing that we ought to do it--went down sixty miles by rail, slept on his yacht, and found ourselves in the morning at his wharf on the island. Your second letter came to hand from Cromer when we returned here, and has as usual lighted up my life.

Cambridge, 2nd September 1870.

We are off this afternoon for Newport on our way to New York, and so south and west. The express man will be here directly for my luggage, which will be a little curtailed, as these dear kind people insist on our returning, and leaving all we don’t want in our rooms. So I shall drop my beaver, leaving it with the most serious admonitions in the charge of Rose, the Irish girl, who is a character. I will now take up the thread of my story, merely remarking that what you seem to think a dull catalogue of small doings at a small watering-place is quite unspeakably delightful to me away here. On the wharf at Nashont Island we found the two young F------s, the elder a colonel in the war, and five months a prisoner in the South, the younger, Malcolm, just left college. I never saw two finer young men, both of them models of strength. They had come down to meet us and bathe, so we stopped and had a splendid header off the wharf and a swim in the bay, after careful inquiries by R------ as to sharks, to which young F------ replied with a twinkle in his eye, that they didn’t lose _many_ friends that way. We walked up to the house after our dip, a large wooden building, with deep verandahs and sun-blinds, furnished quite plainly, even roughly, but capable of holding nearly any number of people. We were about eighteen at breakfast: Mrs. F------ a handsome, clever, elderly lady, born a Quaker, and with their charm of manner, who made tea for the party, and on whose right I sat. Opposite her was her husband with Mrs. L------, the young widow of Lowell’s nephew Charles, the famous soldier, on his left, and therefore opposite me. On my right, a young woman, a cousin of the F------s, a Mrs. P------, whose husband sat down towards the end of the table, the manager of a Western railway, who has given us free passes over his line. Colonel F------, the eldest son, was Lowell’s major, and served with distinction in the war, in which he was taken prisoner, and spent five months in Southern prisons; his wife, a buxom young woman with very good eyes, is Emerson’s daughter, and her brother, a bright boy of twenty-two or twenty-three, was near me. There were two daughters of the family, and two other girls and several boys, all pleasant and easy in hand; but the gem of the party was the young widow. She is not actually pretty, but with a face full of the nobleness of sorrow, which has done its work. I have seldom been more touched than in watching her gentle, cheerful ways, and her sympathy with all the bright life around her. Since the war, in which her husband and only brother R. S------(who commanded the first coloured regiment from Massachusetts, and was buried under his negroes at Fort Wagner) were killed, she has devoted herself to the Freedmen, and is Honorary Secretary to the Society for educating them. After breakfast we started in the yacht for the neighbouring island, on which the great Methodist camp-meeting was going on. This Sunday was the great day. They have occupied this island for some years, and have built there a whole town of pretty little wooden houses like big Chinese toys, dotted about amongst the trees. Most of them consist of only one long room, divided by curtains in the middle. The front half opens to the street, but raised one step above it is the sitting-room, and the inmates sleep in the back, behind the curtains. A few houses have a story above; but F------ bought a lot of photographs for us, which will show you the style of house better than a page of description. There were literally thousands of people on the island, upwards of two thousand collected in a huge circular tent in the middle of the houses, where a preacher was shouting to them. We sat on the skirts of the congregation and listened for some time, but as he was only talking wildly about Nebuddah, Positivism, Theodore Parker, and other heresies and heretics, I was not edified, and got no worship till he had done, when we all stood up and sang the doxology, which was very impressive. I was much disappointed at the gathering in a religious point of view. It was a rare chance for a man with a living word in him, those thousands of decent, sober, attentive New England men and women. They told me that in the evening it would be much more interesting, when there would be great singing of hymns, and many persons would tell how they came to experience religion as they call it; but we could not stay for this. The meeting lasts for weeks, and is in fact an excuse for the gathering at a pretty sea-place in the early autumn of a number of good folk who would think the ordinary watering-places ungodly, but have a longing for a break in their ordinary colourless lives. We sailed back in time for early dinner, meeting on the way huge steamers packed with passengers for the campmeeting, till they were top heavy. Next day we spent in, fishing off the rocks for blue-fish, and in a beautiful little lake of three-quarters of a mile long (one of several in the island) for bass. I caught a blue fish of nine lbs., the biggest and strongest I have ever caught, also the only bass which was taken; so I naturally crowed loudly. The island hours are: breakfast, eight o’clock or half past eight; dinner, two or three; tea, with cold meat, half-past six or seven. After tea on both evenings we got into full swing on the war. I found Mr. F------ and his wife deeply grieved and prejudiced as to our conduct, our feeling to them as a nation, etc., and set myself to work hard to remove all this as far as I could. As he is a very energetic and influential man it is worth taking any amount of trouble about, and I think I succeeded. In the evenings the young folk sang a number of the war songs, several composed by or for the negro soldiers, going to famous airs, and full of humour and pathos. The March through Georgia is very spirited, and a version of the “John Brown” March, which seems to have superseded “We’ll hang Jef Davies,” etc., exceedingly touching--at least I know it was so to me, as all the young folk sang--

He hath sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat,

He is sifting out the souls of men before His judgment seat:

Be swift, my soul, to welcome Him! be jubilant, my feet.

In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.

As he died to make men holy, let us die to make them free.

Our God is marching on.

To think of what that sweet young woman had gone through (the news of her husband’s death at the head of his brigade, was read by her in a newspaper), and to see her sitting there calmly and trying to join in the chorus, was quite too much for me. However, nobody noticed my emotion. Our last morning, Tuesday, was spent in a famous wild ride over the island. After breakfast we found seven very excellent riding horses (three with sidesaddles) at the door. At home there would have been three grooms, here each horse has a leathern strap fixed to the bit, which you just buckle round his neck till you want to stop, and then fasten it to the nearest tree or lamp-post. The whole turn-out is of course rough, but I don’t wish to see nicer ladies’ hacks than the three which the two Miss F------s and Mrs. P------ rode. We sailed back in the yacht to another little port, a few miles north of New Bedford, F------ having provided us as a parting present with free passes over almost all the Western railways, which will save me at least £20 I should think. He is Chairman of several, and so can do it without any trouble. We found the dear Lowells expecting us, and my second letter also waiting, so you may think that I had a joyful evening. Next day, Wednesday, we drove to Concord to dine with Judge Hoar, the late Attorney-General of the United States, a very able, fine fellow. We passed over classic ground, the very road along which the English troops marched in April 1776 to destroy the stores, when the first collision of the War of Independence took place at Concord Bridge and in the village of Lexington. You may perhaps remember in the second series of the _Biglow Papers_ “Sumthin’ in the Pastoral Line,” in which old Concord Bridge and the monument which has been put up to commemorate the fight, talk together over the _Trent_ affair. The Judge’s two sons, very nice young fellows, pulled us up Concord River, which runs at the bottom of their garden, to the spot, and on the way (which is very pretty) we saw lots of tortoises sitting and basking on the stones, and popping in when we approached, and heard a lot of capital Yankee stories from the Judge. Dinner at three; Emerson came, and there were two Miss H------s, and a Miss S------, a handsome girl, sister of the best oar in the Harvard boat of last year. I enjoyed the dinner and smoke afterwards immensely, and am at last quite sure that I am doing some good with some of these men, all of whom are influential, and most of them sadly prejudiced against us still as a nation. For myself it is quite impossible to express their kindness. They seem as if they can never do enough for me. When we got back to Cambridge, we found Miss M------ and Dr. Lowell, brother to James, an English clergyman, and quite charming too in his way.

New York.

I think I have told you already the sort of royal progress I am making. Some principal citizen always comes to the station to meet us in his carriage, books our luggage by the express (an admirable institution which saves you all the trouble with luggage), drives us up to his house, lodges us in the best rooms, has all the best folks in the neighbourhood to meet us at breakfast, dinner, tea, takes us to the sights of the neighbourhood, keeps all his servants out of sight when we are going, so that we can’t give any one a penny or even pay our washing bills, and finally sends us and our luggage down to the next boat or steamer, when we are booked already probably by a new friend. Certainly I never saw, heard of, or could imagine anything like the hospitality. It is no doubt in some degree, and in individual cases, owing to the part I took during the war in England, but Democrats as well as Republicans have been amongst our warmest hosts; in fact, I am fairly puzzled, and allow the tide at last to carry me along, floating down it and enjoying everything as well as I can. I think in my last I got to our start from Boston. No! was it? At any rate, I wrote about our day at Concord, I know, as to which I shall have to tell you more when we meet. After we got home Miss Mabel rushed upstairs, got into her photographing dress, the quaintest turn-out you can conceive, and commenced a series of groups, etc., which you shall have specimens of when I get back. She is endless fun; has the most arch way of talking to her father as “sir” every now and then; is charming with her stepmother; and altogether as bright a bit of life about a house as you would meet on a summer’s day. I parted from Lowell and his home feeling that the meeting had been more than successful. For these eighteen or nineteen years I have revelled in his books--indeed, have got so much from them and learned to love the parent of them so well, as I imagined him, that I almost feared the meeting, lest pleasant illusions should be broken. I found him much better than his books. We had a pleasant three hours’ rail to Newport, finding Mr. Field, a Philadelphian banker, at the station with his carriage. We were friends at once, for he is a famous, frank, goodlooking, John Bullish man of the world, who has travelled all over Europe and retained his new world simplicity and heartiness. He drove us all round the fashionable watering-place, the description of which I must postpone or I never shall get through (as we say here). His cottage, as he calls it, in accordance with the fashion here, is a charming villa, on the most southern point of Newport, close to the rocks on which the grand Atlantic roll was beating magnificently as we drove up.