CHAPTER XIII
THE ADIRONDACK CLUB—EMERSON AND AGASSIZ
In the main, our occupations were those of a vacation, to kill time and escape from the daily groove. Some took their guides and made exploration, by land or water; after breakfast there was firing at a mark, a few rounds each, for those who were riflemen; then, if venison was needed, we put the dog out on the hills; one boat went to overhaul the set lines baited the evening before for the lake trout. When the hunt was over we generally went out to paddle on the lake, Agassiz and Wyman to dredge or botanize or dissect the animals caught or killed; those of us who had interest in natural history watching the naturalists, the others searching the nooks and corners of the pretty sheet of water with its inlet brooks and its bays and recesses, or bathing from the rocks. Lunch was at midday, and then long talks, discussions de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis; and it was surprising to find how many subjects we found germane to our situation.
Emerson has told the daily life in verse in "The Adirondacs," adding his own impressions of the place and time. It is not generally considered among the most interesting of his poems, being a narrative with reflections, and such a subject could hardly rise above the interest of the subject of the narration, which was only a vacation study; but there are in it some passages which show the character of Emerson's intellect better than anything else he has written. His insight into nature, like that of the primitive mind as we find it in the Greek poetry, the instinctive investment of the great mother with the presence and attribute of personality, the re-creation from his own resources of Pan and the nature-powers, the groping about in that darkness of the primeval forest for the spiritual causes of the things he felt,—all this is to me evident in the poem; and it is the sufficient demonstration of the antique mould of his intellect, serene, open-eyed to natural phenomena, seeing beyond the veil they are, to the something beyond, but always questioning, hardly concluding, and with no theories to limit his thought or bend it to preconceived solutions. Knowing that all he saw in this undefiled natural world, this virgin mother of all life (for around Follansbee Pond, at the time we went, there was the primeval woodland, where the lumberer had not yet penetrated, and the grove kept still the immaculacy of the most ancient days), that all this was the mask of things, he was ever on the watch if perchance he might catch some hint of the secret,—secret never to be discovered, and therefore more passionately sought. This seems to me contained in "The Adirondacs" as in no other work of the philosopher. And to me the study of the great student was the dominant interest of the occasion. I was Agassiz's boatman on demand, for while all the others had their personal guides and attendants, I was his; but often when Emerson wanted a boat I managed to provide for Agassiz with one of the unoccupied guides, and take the place of Emerson's own guide. Thus Emerson and I had many hours alone on the lake and in the wood. He seemed to be a living question, perpetually interrogating his impressions of all that there was to be seen. The rest of us were always at the surface of things,—even the naturalists were only engaged with their anatomy; but Emerson in the forest, or looking at the sunset from the lake, seemed to be looking through the phenomena, studying them by their reflections on an inner speculum.
In such a great solitude, stripped of the social conventions and seeing men as they are, mind seems open to mind as it is quite impossible for it to be in society, even the most informal. Agassiz remarked, one day, when a little personal question had shown the limitations of character of one of the company, that he had always found in his Alpine experiences, when the company were living on terms of compulsory intimacy, that men found each other out quickly. And so we found it in the Adirondacks: disguises were soon dropped, and one saw the real characters of his comrades as it was impossible to see them in society. Conventions faded out, masks became transparent, and for good or for ill the man stood naked before the questioning eye,—pure personality. I think I gathered more insight into the character of my companions in our greener Arden, in the two or three weeks' meetings of the club, than all our lives in the city could have given me.
And Emerson was such a study as can but rarely be given any one. The crystalline limpidity of his character, free from all conventions, prejudices, or personal color, gave a facility for study of the man, limited only by the range of vision of the student. How far my vision was competent for this study is not for me to decide; so far as it went I profited, and so far as my experience of men goes he is unique, not so much from intellectual power, for I should be indisposed to accept his as the mind of the greatest calibre among those I have known, but as one of absolute transparency of intellect, perfect receptivity, and devotion to the truth. In the days of persecution and martyrdom Emerson would have gone to the stake smiling and undismayed, but questioning all the time, even as to the nature of his own emotions. It was this serene impassibility in his study of human nature which gave the common impression of his coldness,—an impression which is shown, by the anecdote I have elsewhere recorded of Longfellow, to have been shared by one who might have been supposed to know him well for years. But Emerson was not cold or disposed to make mere subjects of analysis of his friends, as Longfellow thought; he was an eager student of men as of nature, but superficial men he tired of and dropped, nothing being to be learned from them, though where he found what he looked for in a character he never tired of it. His friendships were of the most constant because of this temper, and it was only their serenity and almost impersonality that made them seem frigid to those whose temperament was widely different. Wrong, injustice to man or beast, roused his warmth in indignation,—he could be hot enough on occasion; though the quiet warmth of his affection for his friends was like the sun of May. But undoubtedly his greater passion was for the truth in whatever form he could find it.
Of all the mental experiences of my past life nothing else survives with the vividness of my summers in the Adirondacks with Emerson. The last sight I had of him was when, on his voyage to Egypt, he came to see me at my home in London, aged and showing the decay of age, but as alert and interrogative as ever with his insatiate intellectual activity. And as I look back from the distance of years to the days when we questioned together, he rises above all his contemporaries as Mont Blanc does above the intervening peaks when seen from afar, not the largest in mass, but loftiest in climb, soaring higher if not occupying the space of some of his companions, even in our little assemblies. Emerson was the best listener I ever knew, and at the other meeting-place where I saw him occasionally, the Saturday Club, his attention to what others were saying was far more notable than his disposition to enter into the discussions. Now and then he flashed out with a comment which lit up the subject as an electric spark might, but in general he shone unconsciously. I remember that one day when, at the club, we were discussing the nature of genius, some one turned to Emerson and asked him for a definition of the thing, and he instantly replied, "The faculty of generalizing from a single example;" and nobody at the table could give so good and concise a definition. There is a portrait of him by Rowse, who knew and loved him well, which renders this side of Emerson in a way that makes it the most remarkable piece of portraiture I know, the listening Emerson.
His insatiability in the study of human nature was shown curiously in our first summer's camp. He had the utmost tenderness of animal life and had no sympathy with sport in any form,—he "named the birds without a gun,"—and when we were making up the outfit for the outing he at first refused to take a rifle; but, as the discussion of make, calibre, and quality went on, and everybody else was provided, he at length decided, though no shot, to conform, and purchased a rifle. And when the routine of camp life brought the day of the hunt, the eagerness of the hunters and the passion of the chase, the strong return to our heredity of human primeval occupation gradually involved him, and made him desire to enter into this experience as well as the rest of the forest emotions. He must understand this passion to kill. One Sunday morning, when all the others went out for the drive of the deer,—necessary for the larder, as the drive the day before had failed,—Emerson asked me to take him out on the lake to some quiet place for meditation. We landed in a deep bay, where the seclusion was most complete, and he went into the woods to meditate. Presently we heard the baying of the hound as he circled round the lake, on the hillsides, for the deer at that season were reluctant to take to the water, and gave a long chase; and, as he listened, he began to take in the excitement of the hunters, and finally broke out abruptly, "Let us go after the deer;" and down the lake we went, flying at our best, but we arrived too late,—Lowell had killed the deer.
He said to me later, and emphatically, "I must kill a deer;" and one night we went out "jack-hunting" to enable him to realize that ambition. This kind of hunting, as most people know, is a species of pot-hunting, much employed by the hunters for the market, and so destructive to the deer that it is now forbidden by the law in all the Adirondack country. The deer are stalked by night along the shores, where they come in to feed, the hunter carrying in his boat a light so shaded that it illuminates only the space directly in front of the boat, the glare blinding the animal so that he does not see the boat or the boatman. In this way the deer may be approached within a few yards if the paddler is skillful; but as he stands perfectly still, and is difficult to see in the dim light, the tyro generally misses him. We paddled up to within twenty yards of a buck, and the guide gave the signal to shoot; but Emerson could see nothing resembling a deer, and finally the creature took fright and ran, and all we got of him was the sound of galloping hoofs as he sped away, stopping a moment, when at a safe distance, to snort at the intruders, and then off again. We kept on, and presently came upon another, toward which we drifted even nearer than to the first one, and still Emerson could see nothing to distinguish the deer from the boulders among which he stood; and we were scarcely the boat's length from him, when, Emerson being still unable to see him, and not caring to run the risk of losing him, for we had no venison in camp and the luck of the morning drive was always uncertain, I shot him. We had no other opportunity for the "jack-hunt," and so Emerson went home unsatisfied in this ambition,—glad, no doubt, when he recalled the incident, that he had failed.
The guides—rude men of the woods, rough and illiterate, but with all their physical faculties at a maximum acuteness, senses on the alert and keen as no townsman could comprehend them—were Emerson's avid study. This he had never seen,—the man at his simplest terms, unsophisticated, and, to him, the nearest approach to the primitive savage he would ever be able to examine; and he studied every action. When the dinner was over, and the twilight coming on, he sometimes asked me to row him out on the lake to see the nightfall and watch the "procession of the pines," that weird and ghostly phenomenon I have before alluded to.
More than a generation has passed since then. Twenty-five years afterward I went back to the scene of the meeting. Except myself, the whole company are dead, and the very scene of our acting and thinking has disappeared down to its geological basis, pillaged, burnt, and become a horror to see; but, among the memories which are the only realities left to it, this image of Emerson claiming kinship with the forest stands out alone, and I feel as if I had stood for a moment on a mount of transfiguration, and seen, as if in a vision, the typical American, the noblest in the idealization of the American, of all the race. Lowell was of a more cosmopolitan type, of a wider range of sympathies and affections, accepted and bestowed, and to me a friend, loved as Jonathan loved David; but, as a unique, idealized individuality, Emerson looms up in that Arcadian dream more and more the dominant personality. It is as character, and not as accomplishment or education, that he holds his own in all comparisons with his contemporaries, the fine, crystallized mind, the keen, clear-faceted thinker and seer. I loved more Agassiz and Lowell, but we shall have many a Lowell and Agassiz before we see Emerson's like again. Attainments will be greater, and discovery and accomplishments will surpass themselves as we go on, but to be, as Emerson was, is absolute and complete existence.
Agassiz was, of all our company, the acknowledged master; loved by all, even to the unlettered woodsmen, who ran to meet his service as to no other of the company; by all the members of it reverenced as not even Emerson was; the largest in personality and in universality of knowledge of all the men I have ever known. No one who did not know him personally can conceive the hold he had on everybody who came into relations with him. His vast command of scientific facts, and his ready command of them for all educational purposes, his enthusiasm for science and the diffusion of it, even his fascinating way of imparting it to others, had even less to do with his popularity than the magnetism of his presence and the sympathetic faculty which enabled him to find at once the plane on which he should meet whomever he had to deal with. Of his scientific position I cannot speak, though I can see that his was the most powerful of the scientific influences of that epoch in America. When we were traveling it was always in my boat, and we moved as his investigations prompted, wherever there seemed to be a promise of some addition to his collections. We dredged and netted water and air wherever we went, and of course there arose a certain kind of intimacy, which was partly that of a camaraderie in which we were approximately equals, that of the backwoods life in which I was, if a comparison were to be made, the superior, and partly that of teacher and pupil; for, with trifling attainments, I had the passion of scientific acquisition, and all that Agassiz needed to open the store of his knowledge was the willingness of another to learn.
The odium scientificum, which I notice is no less bitter than the variety theologicum, has, in these years, poured on Agassiz the floods of its opprobrium, and even the little dogs of physical science bark at his name; but his greater contemporaries knew and esteemed him better. The revival of the evolutionary hypothesis by Darwin, and the controversies growing out of it, then filled the air, and Agassiz paid the penalty of his eminence and constancy to the system in which he had been grounded by his master, Cuvier. He was attacked and insulted by men who had never made an observation, and, what was more curious, as a panderer to the theological prejudices of the past. But in my mind was still the memory of a former outcry and theological persecution of him, because he had himself laid down what might be considered the forerunner of the doctrine of evolution,—the declaration that the human race could not have been the offspring of one Adam, but must have had a multiple beginning. The result of this was to bring on his head the execrations of the theological world in a storm which no one who had witnessed it was likely to forget or take for other than what it was, the proof of his absolute scientific honesty,—a proof needed by no one who knew him personally, but which, in view of the later animosity shown him, requires reaffirmation.
As I was much with him at this time, and perhaps, out of his family, the one to whom he talked with the greatest freedom and fullness on the subject, owing to my own intense interest in it, it cannot be amiss that I state his exact position as far as he let me see it. It must be remembered that the doctrine of evolution, as he knew it, and in the only form in which it was then stated, was simply and purely that of development by natural selection acting on chance variation, and differing mainly by this from the doctrine of Lamarck, which had long been rejected by the scientific world at large. We have seen since then that this primitive doctrine has been largely supplemented by other theories, and that it no longer stands before the scientific world in the bare simplicity of Darwin's original statement, though even he, at a later date, claimed natural selection not as the only but as the most influential agency of variation of species in creation; repudiating, however, a plan in the universe, and not demanding the influence of the conscious mind on creation. Agassiz's primary objection to the doctrine was that it left the creator out of creation, for it distinctly repudiated the element of design in it; and, though he did not recognize the Creator of Genesis, he could not dispense with the supreme mind.
Myself a convert to the doctrine of evolution, in as absolute a form as it is held even by the materialists, though differently, I am persuaded that if Agassiz had lived long enough to see the latest development of it he would have accepted it, as did Professor Owen, who was, like Agassiz, and possibly even more literally, a believer in the designer of the universe. The fundamental ground for Agassiz's rejection of it is stated by himself in one of the lectures delivered at Cambridge, as follows: "I believe that all these correspondences between the different aspects of animal life are the manifestations of mind acting consciously with intention towards one object from beginning to end. This view is in accordance with the working of our minds; it is an instinctive recognition of a mental power with which our own is akin, manifesting itself in nature. For this reason, more than any other, perhaps, do I hold that this world of ours was not the result of the action of unconscious organic forces, but the work of an intelligent, conscious power." Whatever might have been the process by which the orderly creation was produced (into which he did not inquire), it was the result of a definite plan and the work of design. The immutability of species, as he defined species, was the logical consequence of this theory, and that, it seems to me, is the substantial difference between him and Darwin.
But Agassiz was no sectarian, and held no other creed than a belief in the Creator. In the fibre of the man was the consciousness of the immanent deity, rooted, perhaps, in that influence of his early theological environage from which no man can ever escape, though he may rebel against it; and the almost universal deduction by the scientific world from Darwin's theory then was that there could be no divine design in creation. It was this negation of the direction of the great artist in the process of creation against which Agassiz rebelled; and although, at a later phase of the conflict, Darwin himself protested against the implication sometimes drawn from his theory, there can be no question that at that moment the general evolutionary opinion was that the hypothesis of a divine authorship of creation was superfluous. Agassiz maintained the presence of "Conscious Mind in Creation;" Darwin did not deny it explicitly, nor did he admit it.
As a matter of observation, no case of a development of one species from another has ever been noted, and the evidence for it is precisely analogous to that adduced by Agassiz, "that it is in accordance with the working of our minds," still further illuminated by the side-lights which science has thrown on it since Agassiz died. The ultimate decision in the individual mind will be according to the bias for or against the "conscious mind" or automatic creation; and it must not be forgotten that one of the most powerful arguments for a large evolution was the discovery by Agassiz that the embryo of the highest organizations passes through an evolution similar to that of the animal creation. Professor Martins—a leading French scientist and an evolutionist—says of Agassiz: "Another of these precursors of modern science is Louis Agassiz. The oldest fossil forms have a simpler organization than the later ones, and represent some stage of the embryonic development of the latter. This truth, established by Agassiz, has, more than any other, enlightened the history of creation, and prepared for the generalization by which the whole may be comprehended. The oldest fishes known are all more or less related to the sharks and skates; their teeth and scales only, with small portions of the skeleton, have been preserved. Their form, widely different from that of the living species, recalls that of the embryo of our living fishes. This is a truth which Louis Agassiz was the first to proclaim to the scientific world."[1]
[Footnote 1: De l'Origine du Monde organique.]
But, beyond this question as to the evidence of mutability of species which Agassiz did not find, he took the position "that the hypothesis of the method of creation by evolution exceeded physical science and became theology, which belonged to the province of theology, into which he had no intention of venturing." That was his statement to me during the interval between the two attacks of brain trouble from the latter of which he died. Science, to his understanding, was observation and classification, arrangement, and it had no function in investigating the causes or modus operandi through which things became what they were.
Amongst the evolutionists whom I have known there have been several who did not accept without modification the theory of natural selection, and supplemented it by design, amongst whom I may mention the great American botanist, Asa Gray,—one of the most distinguished of Darwinians,—who accepted the method of evolution as the modus operandi of the Supreme Intelligence. Professor Jeffries Wyman, the associate of Agassiz in the University, who was one of the doctors of our Adirondack company, accepted in a qualified manner the theory of evolution, but his premature and lamented death set the seal to his conclusions before they were complete, though I have always had the impression that his position was similar to that of Gray. To my question one day as to his conclusions, he replied, with a caution characteristic of the man and very unlike the resolute attitude of Agassiz before the question which the Sphinx proposes still, "An evolution of some sort there certainly was," but nothing more would he say. The loss to American science in his death can never be estimated, for his mind was of that subtle and inductive nature which is needed for such a study, fine to poetic delicacy, penetrating with all the acumen of a true scientific imagination, but modest to excess, and personally so attached to Agassiz that he would with reluctance give expression to a difference from him, though that he did differ was no occasion for abatement of their mutual regard. Wyman's was the poetry of scientific research, Agassiz's its prose, and they offered a remarkable example of mental antithesis, from which, had Wyman lived, much might have been expected through their association in study. Wyman had all the delicacy of a fine feminine organization, wedded unfortunately to a fragile constitution, but the friendship he held for the robust and dominating character of the great Switzer was to the utmost reciprocated.
And Agassiz's disposition was as generous as large. He had absolutely no scientific jealousy or sectarian feeling. The rancor which was shown him by some of the Darwinians never disturbed his serenity an instant; for of the world's opinion of him and his ideas, even when the "world" was scientific, he never took account other than to regret that science was the loser, by running off on what he considered side issues. We had much conversation on the question of evolution and allied topics, in which my part was naturally that of listener and only occasional questioner, and I remember the warm appreciation he always expressed for Darwin and his researches, for his fineness of observation and scientific honesty. He regarded the widespread acceptance of the theory of natural selection as one of the epidemics which have swept the scientific world from time to time, and looked with absolute serenity to the return of science one day to the conception of creation by design.
I am neither qualified nor disposed to pass judgment on Agassiz as a scientist, or institute any kind of comparison of his relative authority, and probably the time is far away at which his comparative eminence can be estimated impartially. I have only to do with his personality as it appeared to me in our relations, and, as the latest survivor of those who enjoyed that greenwood intimacy, to put on record my impression of the great, lovable, magnanimous man. Of his unbounded generosity and indifference to personal advantage, his freedom from scientific jealousy, everybody who came in contact with him was witness. He refused all offers of emolument from any quarter, and spent all his surplus earnings for the aggrandizement of the great natural-history museum he founded at Cambridge. The propositions of the Emperor Napoleon III. he had declined with thanks as soon as made, and without a thought. He had come to America to study natural history, and did not propose to be diverted from this purpose. To a lecturing agent who offered him a very large sum for delivering a course of lectures in the principal cities of the Union, he replied that he had no time to make money; and he died of overwork, insatiate in the pursuit of the completion of his museum and the classification of his observations. I have heard him speak with pain of the animosity shown him by a Swiss associate in his glacial investigations, who had once been his warm advocate, but there was no bitterness in his manner. I am convinced that there was no bitterness in him, and that all personal feeling was overshadowed and minimized by his absolute devotion to scientific truth, with his loyalty to which nothing ever interfered.
His influence even on the business men of the city of Boston and the legislature of the State of Massachusetts was the most remarkable phenomenon of the kind ever witnessed in that frugal and matter-of-fact community, for he had only to announce that he wanted for his museum or department in the University a donation or an appropriation, to obtain either, so absolutely recognized was his unselfish devotion to science by all classes. There are few of us left who can remember the sudden shadow that fell on our community at his unexpected death, and the universal grief that told of the hold he had on the entire nation; and the mourning extended far beyond the circle of personal acquaintance with Agassiz. Even men who had no interest in physical science took it into consideration on account of him, carried away by his enthusiastic advocacy of its advancement. The religious world forgot the indignation at his repudiation of Adam in the refuge it found from absolute atheism in his affirmation of a Supreme Intelligence, as Creator of all things, though to theological contentions he never gave the slightest consideration.
It is needless to say that this was the effect, not of scientific education or of the capacity in the great majority of those who accepted his position to judge of a theory or a scientific line of demonstration, but of the dominance of personal character in the man, his inflexible honesty and disinterestedness. The last time I saw him was when he came to make me a brief visit in a glen of the White Mountains, where I was encamped near a subject which I was painting, and which was in part composed of huge boulders, dropped in the gorge by a primeval glacier, and brought, perhaps, from beyond Lake Superior. He had then had the first attack of the brain trouble, from which he was recovering, and was making a mountain trip where he could, if possible, study and rest at once. But his want of common prudence in regard to overwork prevented his recovery, and he died just as he was beginning to elaborate his conclusions on the doctrine of evolution, for which he had a colossal plan, cut short in its opening. He was always too hurried in his work, as if he knew that his life would not suffice for its completion, if indeed completion were possible in such work, and he persisted in accumulation of material without pause either to coordinate his ideas or to rest and reflect. I one day said to him that I was intending to write a little book, and he exclaimed: "Oh, I wish I had time to write a little book! All my books come large, and I have not the time to condense them."
CHAPTER XIV
LOWELL
The third magnate of our Club was Lowell, with whose personality the world at large is already well acquainted. In his own day and presence it was impossible to form a satisfactory personal judgment of him, and even now, through the perspective of the years since he died, it is out of the question for me to pronounce a dispassionate judgment. Of all that New England world, so hospitable, so brotherly to me that if I had been born in Cambridge it could hardly have been more kind, Lowell and Norton were those who most made my welcome free from any embarrassment to myself. Norton, almost exactly my contemporary, is still living, and which of us two shall say the last word for the other is in the lap of the gods, but in the Adirondack Club life he does not appear. No kinder or wiser friend have I ever had. Himself the son of one of the most distinguished of the great Unitarian leaders of liberal New England, his broad, common-sense views of sectarian questions first widened my religious horizon, emancipated me from the tithes of mint and cummin, and helped me to see the value of observances, and his hand was always held out to me in those straitened moments in which my impulsive and ill-regulated manner of life continually landed me. I shall not disturb the serenity of his old age by the indiscreet garrulity of mine. But the brotherhood between him and Lowell brought our lives together, and Lowell was the pole to which both our needles swung. Norton's delicate health made it impossible for him to take part in the excursions made by the Club, though he was enrolled as a member.
Of Lowell much has been said by many people, some of whom were less, and others, perhaps, better acquainted with him than I was, but of him I can speak at least without restraint, other than that which love and gratitude impose. And to-day, more than forty years since I found his friendship what it ever remained, the judgment I formed of him at first acquaintance comes up again in one point dominant. He seemed to me a man whom good fortune, and especially the favor of society, had prevented from filling the rôle that fate had intended for him. There was in not a few of his poems the promise of reaching a height which was attainable only to a man who climbs light. There was in him the possible making of a great reformer, an evangelist, which possibility never became actuality, owing to the weight which social success laid on him.
All through his early poems runs the thread of a fine morality, the perception of the highest obligations of religion and philanthropy, the subtle distinction of the purest Christianity, the defense of the weak and oppressed, the succor of the poor; in fine, the creed of a practical religion which required its adherent to go into the slums and out on the highways to carry out his convictions in acts. In the warfare he waged on slavery when the anti-slavery cause was very unpopular, and, in the case of Garrison and others, brought on its advocates continual danger and occasional violence, Lowell was unsparing in the denunciation of the national sin; but whether because the anti-abolition public which ruled Boston thought denunciation in form of verse had no practical value, or because the personal fascination the man always exercised on all around him was such as to disarm hostility, it happened that he was never made the object of aggression.
"Men called him but a shiftless youth,
In whom no good they saw;
And yet, unwittingly, in truth,
They made his careless word their law.
"Men granted that his speech was wise,
But, when a glance they caught
Of his slim grace and woman's eyes,
They laughed and called him good-for-naught."
There was a gracious indolence in him, an imperturbable serenity, which made proclamation in advance of a truce to all forms of brute collision. No doubt if they had hunted him out for a victim of the political animosity which led to so many tragedies in the early days of our anti-slavery agitation, he would have stood up to the stake as gayly as one of the martyrs of old; but the man's nature was repugnant to discords, and shrank from combats ruder than those of the printing-press.
All through his career, the religion of humanity is put forward with point and persistence, and the finest of distinctions in morality are maintained,—the so constantly ignored vital difference between the deed and its motive, as in "Sir Launfal:"—
"The Holy Supper is kept, indeed,
In whatso we share with another's need;
Not what we give, but what we share,—
For the gift without the giver is bare;
Who gives himself with his alms feeds three,—
Himself, his hungering neighbor, and Me;"
so that one might have expected from him the life of a social reformer, so keenly did he feel the outrages of civilization. But, possibly from the fact that in those days human slavery in our country summed up all villainies and crimes, and in the war against that he threw all his surplus energy, he never took part in the crusade then beginning against the more familiar iniquities nearer home. But in his constitution there was, I think, another reason why the author of "Sir Launfal," "Hunger and Cold," "The Landlord," and "The Search" should not have emulated Howard or Miss Fry, and have gone into the realms of destitution to relieve its wrongs. He was extremely fastidious, and anything that offended his taste by vulgarity or crudeness repelled him with such force that the work of practical philanthropy would have been impossible to his temperament. The indolence I have above spoken of—which must not be confounded with slothfulness, but is, as the true meaning of the word indicates, the following of the dictates of the temperament, whether in activity or rest—led him to contemplation rather than action.
The refined idealism of his nature, made more subtle by the indulgence of an idolizing circle of relatives and friends, who saw in him the promise of more even than he ever attained, or than was possible to the smooth prosperity of his life, made it impossible for him to thrust himself into the social conflicts, whether of poverty or of politics, though the finest and most exalted passages of his work were not so fine and exalted as his personality; he was better than anything he ever wrote, and this is understood by all who knew him, and that what he wrote was only the overflow of a mind which never needed a stimulus to divine cogitation. The fascination, the subtle personal glamour he unconsciously threw over those who came in true contact with him, made them always expect more than he accomplished, for in that there was not even the stimulus of ambition. What he did was done with the spontaneousness of the wind or the sunshine. If he had a vanity, it was to be in all points accoutred for his place in society; but even this was so lightly held that few knew him well enough to see it, and it was never a motive power in him.
Knowing all his earlier work before I knew him, I thought I detected a want of that profounder sympathy with humanity and the pathos of life which comes from actual suffering, and I remember saying to one of his admirers, before I saw him, that what he wanted to make him a great poet was suffering. This he had gained somewhat of when I made his acquaintance. His wife had died not long before I went to Cambridge to see him and to enlist his assistance in "The Crayon," and he was in the earliest phase of the reaction from a sorrow which had made him insist on solitude. All his surroundings had kept up the impressions of his bereavement, and all his associates sympathized with and respected it, and I came in with a new life just as he came to need relief from the depression which had become morbid. He has told it in one of his first letters to me:—
"I am glad you had a pleasant time here. I had, and you made me fifteen years younger while you stayed. When a man gets to my age, enthusiasms don't often knock at the door of his garret. I am all the more charmed with them when they come. A youth full of such pure intensity of hope and faith and purpose, what is he but the breath of a resurrection trumpet to us stiffened old fellows, bidding us up out of our clay and earth if we would not be too late?
"Your inspiration is still to you a living mistress; make her immortal in her promptings and her consolations by imaging her truly in art. Mine looks at me with eyes of paler flame, and beckons across a gulf. You came into my loneliness like an incarnate inspiration. And it is dreary enough sometimes; for a mountain peak on whose snow your foot makes the first mortal print is not so lonely as a room full of happy faces from which one is missing forever."
The tone of his life at that period is given in the few poems of the time, published later: the "Ode to Happiness," which he read to me unfinished during that first visit; "The Wind-Harp," in which
"There murmured, as if one strove to speak,
And tears came instead; then the sad tones wandered
And faltered among the uncertain chords
In a troubled doubt between sorrow and words;
At last with themselves they questioned and pondered,
'Hereafter?—who knoweth?' and so they sighed
Down the long steps that lead to silence and died;"
"The Dead House," "Auf Wiedersehen (Summer)" and the "Palinode (Autumn)," in which the first grief had deepened while losing its acuteness, and the feeling of loneliness had taken largely the place of the first desolation, the wrenching apart of soul and body:—
"It is pagan; but wait till you feel it,—
That jar of our earth, that dull shock
When the ploughshare of deeper passion
Tears down to our primitive rock;"
and some of his friends had tried the folly of condolence, to whom he replies, in the same poem ("After the Burial"):—
"Console if you will, I can bear it;
'Tis a well-meant alms of breath;
But not all the preaching since Adam
Has made Death other than Death."
But the man was too robust in body and mind to linger long in the shadows of melancholy, and though the effects of bereavement—which, in the few years before I knew him, had taken his only boy, who died in Rome, his elder daughter, of whose death "The First Snow-Fall" keeps a touching record, and finally his wife—deepened his character as expressed in his subsequent writing, the buoyancy and elasticity which he found in his enjoyment of nature, and his severe application to the studies of the new position to which the retirement of Longfellow from the professorship of modern languages at Harvard promoted him, restored his old tone of life, while his very happy marriage with his second wife made him, as may now be said without indiscretion, happier than he had ever been.
The second Mrs. Lowell was a woman of the rarest mental, moral, and personal qualities, and her influence on Lowell was of the happiest and sunniest. She was one of three daughters of a merchant of Maine, who had left them without other resources than what their own excellent education gave them, and with the charge of a younger brother, for whose education they provided after the New England way. The other sisters I never knew; but Fannie, Mrs. Lowell, was one of the most remarkable women I ever knew for the combination of resolute and persistent courage and serene religious temperament. She was a Swedenborgian, and probably owed to that form of faith her serenity and imperturbable faith in a Divine Providence; but her unflinching courage in adversity and her extreme sweetness of character were of her New England birth and education. After her father's death she became a governess, and came to Lowell's house in that capacity after the death of his wife; but she had, before that, gone through many vicissitudes of fortune. She told me one day an incident of travel which is worth recording as indicating her character. She had been in a situation in Charleston, S.C., and had accepted another in the valley of the Ohio, to reach which, there being then no railway that traversed the distance, she had to make a long journey by stagecoach, traveling day and night across the Alleghanies. One night she found herself in the coach with a single fellow-passenger, apparently a gentleman, who took his place with her on the back seat, and who, after a time, pretending to be asleep, fell over towards her, so that his head lay on her shoulder, but, correcting himself, sat upright again, to repeat the feint again and again, each time with more abandon, until his arm dropped behind Fannie's waist, with an unmistakable attempt to embrace her. She quietly drew out her shawl-pin and drove it into his arm, without any remark or other attention to him. He sat up instantly, at the next stopping-place took an outside seat, and discontinued his journey at the first town they came to.
Mrs. Lowell fitted her husband as sunshine fits calm, and the gravest sorrow he ever felt with her was her having no children. When, two or three years after the time I am now writing of, I had decided to go to Europe again, and he tried to dissuade me from going, and I, for reasons I could not tell him, persisted, he brought me one day, just before I sailed, six hundred dollars, insisting on my accepting it as a gift, saying: "I shall never want it. I know now that I shall never have another child, and I can well spare it." Lowell had never been wealthy, but he had an income sufficient for all needs in the state of life which he preferred, and his generosity towards his friends who were poorer than he took all the surplus. He rejoiced in the addition to his income in the salary of his professorship, but it added nothing to his own expenditure. And yet I have always felt that if he had been a poor man, compelled to work for his daily bread, he would have occupied a larger place in the world of letters. He was not one of the "intellectual giants buried under mountains of gold," but he was a greater man than he ever showed him self, always cushioned by a sufficiency of fortune for all his needs, and by his tastes inclined to a simple and tranquil life; for, though he became later a political personage, he cared little, au fond, for the political world. Perhaps the little was too much for his attainment as a poet, and some of his best friends have always held that his diplomatic life was a disaster for his intellectual completion.
I have elsewhere alluded to his going to Europe to complete the preparations to enter into his professorship, and when he came back from this voyage he said to me, "I must study yet a good deal before I attempt to produce anything more." He finally felt the carelessness of form in his work, and in the succeeding years he worked very hard in his professorial work, which was, perhaps, not the best for his advancement as an author, but it certainly gave more solidity to the production of those years which intervened between his simpler life and his diplomatic career. His lectures before the students and the public (the popularity of Lowell as a lecturer was immense) solidified an education which, as he himself humorously avowed, was often broken by freaks of irrepressible youthful spirit; and the saddening and indelible effects of the war, which came between and sharply divided those phases of his career, had so modified his character for the graver and more profound that I agree with those of his friends who consider his entry into the diplomatic career as a misfortune for American letters, and that his mind flowed to waste in those later years. Nor was he at home in diplomacy. It was a reversal of all the conditions of his habitual existence; but it flattered his amour propre that the country should recognize the part he had taken in the cultivation of the anti-slavery sentiment of the nation, and the trace of worldly feeling which I have noted grew under the stimulus to a motive in life. His social gifts were very great, and his patriotic pride intensified the pleasure of his successes in a line of life which was really secondary in his nature.
In those years of his diplomatic life we saw little of each other. Our intimate intercourse was suspended by my going to Europe in 1859. We were nearest each other in our Adirondack life, in which he had all the zest of a boy. He was the soul of the merriment of the company, fullest of witticisms, keenest in appreciation of the liberty of the occasion, and the genius loci. One sees through all his nature-poetry the traces of the heredity of the early settler, the keen enjoyment of the fresh and unhackneyed in nature, even of the angularity of the New England farmhouse and the brightness and newness of the villages, so crude to the tastes founded in the picturesqueness of the Old World. Not even Emerson, with all his indifference to the mere form of things, took to unimproved and uncivilized nature as Lowell did, and his free delight in the Wilderness was a thing to remember, and perhaps by none so keenly appreciated as by me, to whom the joy of forest life was a satisfactory motive for living.
CHAPTER XV
THE ADIRONDACK AND FLORIDA
Of the rest of our company in that famous old camp by "Follansbee Water" there is little more to be said which will interest others or recall names known to the world. I painted a study of the camp and its inhabitants, with the intention of making from it, at a future time, a picture which should commemorate the meeting; but, owing to changes in my plans, it remained a study, and was purchased by Judge Hoar, the most eminent of my companions still to be described. He had been a justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts,—a man as well known for his intellectual fibre and sympathy with letters as for his judicial abilities. He was one of the most brilliant members of the old Saturday Club, of which ours might be considered the offspring and succursal; of wit the most spontaneous and electric, whose sallies burst in the merriment of our al fresco camp dinners with the flash and surprise of rockets, and left behind them the perfume of erudition as did no others of the company, not even Lowell's. In my study the party is divided in the habit of the morning occupations: Lowell, Hoar, Binney, Woodman, and myself engaged in firing at the target; Agassiz and Wyman dissecting a trout on a tree-stump, while Holmes and Dr. Howe watch the operation; but Emerson, recognizing himself as neither a marksman nor a scientist, choosing a position between the two groups, pilgrim-staff in hand, watches the marksmen, with a slight preference as between the two groups. My own figure I painted from a photograph, the company insisting on my putting myself in; but it was ill done, for I could never paint from a photograph.
When the company left me I returned to my painting, and remained in camp as long as the weather permitted. On my return to Cambridge I became affianced to Miss Mack, the eldest daughter of Dr. David Mack, with whom I had been boarding while I was occupied in painting the various pictures of the Oaks at Waverley.
The excursion had been so satisfactory that when the whole company had come together again, in the autumn, at Cambridge, the formal organization of the Club was called for, and to the number of those who had been at Camp Maple there was a large accession of the most prominent members of the intellectual society of Boston and Cambridge. It was decided to purchase a tract in the Adirondack Wilderness, the less accessible the better, and there to build a permanent club-house, and I was appointed to select the site and lay it out. The meeting was late in the autumn, and the winter had set in with heavy snow before I had my orders. I caught a severe cold at New York,—a trivial matter to notice, but one which very narrowly escaped the gravest consequences to me; for the cold became aggravated to a bronchial attack, disregarding which I pushed on into the Wilderness, and drove from the settlements in to the Saranac in a storm, facing a northwesterly wind which, filling the air with a cold fog as penetrating as the wind, crystallized on every tree and twig, and made the entire forest, as far as the eye could reach, like a forest of frosted silver. It was a spectacle for a lifetime, and has never been offered to me again; but I reached Martin's, where we had to put up, dangerously chilled.
Next day, however, I had all the guides of the neighborhood in for consultation as to a certain tract which I had fixed on from report and general knowledge of the region, and we planned a survey in the snow. It was fourteen miles from any house to the lake I had fixed on,—that known as the Ampersand Pond; but, fortunately, there were, amongst the guides called in, some who had been assistants in the official survey, and, with their practical knowledge and memory of the lines, I was enabled, without leaving the inn, to draw a map of the section of a township which included the lake, and determine its exact position, with the fact that it had been forfeited to the State at the last tax sale, and was for sale at the land office in Albany. We bought the entire section, less 500 acres, taxes on which had been paid, for the sum of $600,—thus securing for the Club a tract of 22,500 acres. My cough was increasing alarmingly, and, when I consulted a physician at New York, he advised me to get home and to bed as quickly as I might; so, returning to Boston, I called together the executive committee of the Club to dinner, made my report, drank a glass of champagne to the future lodge, and went to bed in the early stages of pneumonia, which kept me prostrate six weeks.
I owed it to the fortunate and intelligent woodcraft of my guides that I was not caught in the depth of the forest by the increasing lung trouble, probably never to return to civilization. It was the closest shave to death that I have ever had, and the actual survey of the tract, buried four feet deep in snow, without a shelter or other bed than the ground, would in all probability have finished me, for I barely escaped as it was; but I was determined to finish my work, animated by the same incomprehension of, rather than indifference to, the danger before me which had obtained in my Hungarian expedition and in many other circumstances of my life. Something of the splendid physical health I brought back with me from the Wilderness helped me, no doubt, through the attack of pneumonia and pleurisy, which released me in the early spring, when I was ordered off to Florida to recuperate. Being advised not to occupy myself with painting while there, I bought a photographic apparatus, and learned photography as it was practiced in 1857,—a rude, inefficient, and cumbersome apparatus and process for field work, of which few amateurs nowadays can conceive the inconveniences.
This trip—for the means to make which I was indebted to Norton, my illness having exhausted my resources, and the great crisis which had broken over New York the year before having swept off the fortune of my brother—gave me a sight of the South before the war, with slavery and the patriarchal system at its perfection. I went up the St. John's River, and took board at a plantation called Hibernia, one of numerous similar establishments on the river, hotels proper not existing there. The owner of the plantation, old Colonel Fleming, was one of the traditional patriarchal planters, and the experience I gained there certainly agreed with the views of the institution of slavery entertained by the great majority of Southern people I have known. I never heard of the punishment of a slave, or saw a discontented negro; the black children were the jolliest little creatures I ever saw in clothes, and the adults seemed to do as much or as little work as they pleased.
I had carried my rifle with me, and young Fleming and I used to go hunting for alligators, still abundant in the river. The thickets of palmetto and the groves of magnolia filling the air with new and cloying fragrance, alternating with other unaccustomed odors which made the grove resemble an orchestra of perfumes, were to me a new and delightful experience. There was a mythical wild turkey in the woods around, and the hope of a shot at him carried me many a mile, though he proved only a myth; but of rattlesnakes and copperheads there was no lack. As I was collecting specimens for the natural-history museum of Cambridge, I canned the largest snakes that I came across, and I secured one rattlesnake which measured nine feet; but the fear of his kind never damped my enthusiasm for the luxuriant forest. Into the great cypress swamps, with their centennial trees, swarming with reptiles of infinite variety, there run devious inlets which they call "creeks," and up these I used to paddle my skiff, and lie and watch the teeming life, wishing I were a naturalist. I spent a week at the ancient (for America) town of St. Augustine, on the Atlantic coast,—then the sleepy watering-place of a few Southern invalids,—and enjoyed greatly its local color, so different from that of all other American towns, its picturesque fortress of the days of Spanish rule, and its Spanish fishermen, in their undiluted nationality and costume. I here poisoned myself dreadfully, rubbing with my legs some poison plant as I shinned up the trees for epiphytal orchids, new to me and an irresistible attraction.
To naturalists, this part of Florida must have been a most interesting field before the bird-slaughterers had invaded it to the extermination of its myriad population of feathered winterers from the Northern regions. The geological formation is a concrete of shells of enormous thickness, which has hardened to the only semblance of rock which the coast affords, and the low dunes have shut off from the Atlantic long lagoons which swarm with life, marine and aquatic creatures occurring in numberless species and orders; alligators lie in wait for their prey, and schools of porpoises come in by the inlets in pursuit of other schools of fat mullet which swarm in the water. Such teeming life I had never before any conception of. In the surf the sharks lurked and coasted up and down, watching us as we waded in fishing for bass, if by chance we should give them an opportunity for a bite; the sharp, warning fin showing in the hollow green of the combing breaker ever and anon as we stood thigh-deep in the foam. It made one shudder to see that silent terror patrolling up and down the margin of the deep water, waiting for an incautious venture of the bather beyond the shallows, into which the shark dared not come.
I went with a fishing party down the coast to Matanzas, an abandoned fort of the early Spanish days, and passed there the most impressive open-air night in my recollection. We camped on the beach, and my shelter was a gauze mosquito netting stretched over four poles, about three feet high, driven in the sand, and as wide as high, and my bed was the sea sand, no covering being required. Through the gauze the sea breeze blew gently; on one side of the long, narrow beach the great Atlantic breakers roared a monotonous bass, and on the other there came from the lagoon the many-toned murmur of a thousand bird voices, some familiar and some strange, whooping of cranes and chattering of coots, ducks, and divers, cries of pelicans, and now and then the sound of flapping wings, as if some great bird had been routed out and had changed his feeding-ground. Around me on the sand ran and crawled the host of crabs, some pulling curiously at the gauze of my shelter; and now and then a huge spider crab climbed up the netting like a squirrel and danced an infernal jig over my head, skipping about on the very tips of his claws, until I tired of his frivolity and hit him from underneath, when he scuttled away, and after half an hour, more or less, was succeeded by another, as if they found an intoxication in dancing over my head. The gnats sang their monody, and the midges put in their treble, but the meshes of my gauze were too fine to let them pass; and after hours of this strange pandemonium I fell asleep, to be waked in the morning by the sun streaming over me from the broad Atlantic.
It is worthy to note here, in justice to the old days of the Floridian society, a society now utterly extinct, and a subject of history, that the kindliness to the slaves was universal on the St. John's River. At nightfall they used to gather in their quarters and sing; and they had a peculiar yodel, which, starting from one plantation, was caught up by the others, and ran round and off along the river into the distance and back, going and coming again and again with a peculiar fascination, like the voice of a happy and careless common life. It was a kindly and indulgent community, and that it was a slave-holding society never forced itself on the attention. The lazy social virtues had, no doubt, their lazy vices, but we never saw them on the surface. The negro quarters were as merry as the day was long, and the negro was a more important and better appreciated element of social life than in the North. The whole valley joined in unreserved malediction of a planter, one of our neighbors, who had profited by the accidental burning of the free papers of a black family which had been bought out of slavery by the father, with money earned as pilot to the steamers of the United States Army during the Seminole War, to compel him to purchase himself and his wife and children again, and the thief was spoken of as the meanest of white men, out of the social pale of self-respecting folk; cheating a slave being far worse than cheating one of his own class. The old scoundrel was the reproach of the whole community; but no more formal indictment of the system of slavery, as established in the United States, is required than the fact that a former master could recall to slavery an emancipated slave family, the head of which had paid in hard cash for himself, his wife, and all his children, because his free papers had been burned, in a fire of which, moreover, the neighbors accused the former owner of being the incendiary. While those papers were in existence the negro could legally sue and be sued; but without them he had no more legal rights than a dog. The life which honest people lived in that primitive community was Arcadian, and it is probable that even in Arcadia they had slaves. Certainly, in my experience of living in many countries and under various systems, I have not found that the most primitive system secures the largest personal liberty; rather the contrary.
I returned to my painting with the early summer, and, when the season came, to the organization of the Club and the inauguration of its club-house and grounds. It was certainly the most beautiful site I have ever seen in the Adirondack country,—virgin forest, save where the trappers or hunters had cut wood for their camp-fires, the tall pines standing in their long ranks along the shores of a little lake that lay in the middle of the estate, encircled by mountains, except on one side, where the lake found its outlet; and the mountains were cloaked to their summits in primeval woods. In a little valley where a crystal spring sent its water down to the lake, and a grove of deciduous trees gave high and airy shelter, I pitched the camp,—a repetition slightly enlarged of that on Follansbee Pond. As usual I preceded the Club party, accompanied by S.G. Ward and his son, and also the son of Emerson, to prepare the ground. The solitude of the locality may be judged from the first hunt. We had arrived late in the day, and had no food except the bread we took with us, and the next morning we had to kill our breakfast before we could eat it. I took Mr. Ward and the boys in my boat and paddled down to the foot of the lake, where was a wide beach, on which we found a two-year-old buck grazing. I paddled to within fifty yards of him, and, though I found that my rifle would not go off and had to change it for another, with considerable movement, the deer took no notice of us, and I dropped him in his tracks with a feeling of compunction only overcome by the fact that we had no breakfast if he went away. So peaceful was our realm! I have often paddled within easy shot of a deer on other waters, but only by remaining motionless when he was looking round, for the movement of a hand would send him flying in panic; but this poor deer might have been reared in Eden.
The meeting of the Club that year was a most successful one; and when it was over, and I was left alone to my painting, I selected a subject in which, for the first time, I introduced a dramatic element. I supposed that a hunter and a buck had had a hand-to-horn fight, and, during it, had fallen together over a ledge of rocks, at the bottom of which both lay dead. A perpendicular ledge of granite, about twenty feet high, mosses and ferns clinging in its crevices, overhanging a level space covered with a heavy growth of luxuriant fern, furnished the background. There I laid the first large buck I killed, and painted him with extreme care, and then painted my guide with his arms locked in the antlers of the deer. The hour was the late afternoon, when the red sunlight slanted through the trees and fell in broken masses on the face of the cliff, catching the leaves here and there in its path. All this was painted carefully from the scene, with as much of the details of the forest as the time permitted, on a canvas twenty-five by thirty inches, on which I worked about two months, till the lake began to freeze and the snow fell. The thermometer was about zero Fahrenheit before I broke off, early in November.
I never enjoyed so entirely the forest life as that autumn. I had laid a line of sable traps for miles through the woods, and caught several "prime" sable which I intended as a present to my fiancée, and the long walks over the line in the absolute silence of the great forest, the snowfall, and the gorgeous autumn were more fascinating than ever before. The bears left their tracks around me, and several pumas made themselves heard, but of wolves, which I had heard in other parts of the woods, I heard none. Returning in the gloaming from my traps, one day, I heard at a distance a wailing cry like that of a woman in distress, to which I replied by hallooing at the top of my voice. After a few minutes I heard the cry again, approaching me, and again responded. The cry continued, still nearer and nearer, but slow in its approach; and, wondering why so slow, I finally fired my rifle three times rapidly, which is the conventional signal for help, and at the same time a reply to the call for help; and it was only when this evoked no further call that I remembered that the cry was that of a puma.
As usual I lived alone, save for the weekly visit of my guide bringing me bread and my post. It was with the greatest reluctance that I obeyed the necessity to return to the state of civilization, and took leave of that most charming retreat of the natural man from the artificial life. That was my last serious experience of woodland life. The uneasy and thriftless spirit which drove me out, like the possessed of the Scripture, to wander in strange places at times, again drove me that winter to England, putting, as it happened, against my intention or prevision, an end to the American period of my life.
CHAPTER XVI
ENGLAND AGAIN
I have generally been happy at sea; and when not so, it has been from reasons apart from the sea itself,—preoccupations which kept me insensible to the old charm, or mental troubles which made me insensible to everything beside them. On this voyage I had the company of an old friend of the days of "The Crayon," one of our most thoughtful and successful portrait painters, George Fuller, and a young friend of his, a Mr. Ames. We sailed just before Christmas, in an old sailing ship of about eight hundred tons burthen; for, unless time is of importance, I prefer a sailing ship to a steamer, and one pleasant companion is worth a shipload of commonplace fellow-voyagers. A stiff westerly blow caught us off Sandy Hook, and never left us till we were halfway across the Atlantic, increasing in violence every day, until it gave me, what I had always longed for, but never seen, a first-class gale on the open ocean.
I had said to the captain (one of the old sort of Cape Cod sailors, still a young man, however) that I wanted to see a real gale; and one day, after we had been out nearly a week, he called me up on deck, saying, "You wanted to see a gale, and now you may see it; for unless you get into a tornado you will never see anything worse than this." I went on deck, obliged to hold firmly to the rails or some part of the rigging, for the wind was such as to have carried me overboard if I had attempted to stand alone on the quarter-deck. We were running with the wind dead abaft, under a reefed fore-topsail and a storm jib, everything else having been taken in the night before. The studding-sail boom of the foreyard, which had been carelessly left out, had been broken off short in the earing, from the pressure of the wind on the bare spar. The roaring of the wind through the rigging was such as only one who has heard it can conceive.
I gripped close the quarter-deck railing, and drew myself aft to the shelter of the wheelhouse, where, securing myself from being blown away like a piece of paper, I watched the sea. It rose behind us in huge mountains, the summits of which were always combing over and sliding down the weltering flanks of the wave,—not like the surf on a shore, but pushed over like snow; and as a wave overtook us lying in the bottom of the valley, it so overhung that it seemed impossible that when it broke it should not bury us; but the stern was always caught by the forefoot of it, and the old ship began to rise, and went up, up, up, until I was dizzy. Then we hovered on the summit a moment, looking out on such an expanse of gigantic waves as I had never pictured to myself, the distance lost in the driving spray; and, while I looked, the wave passed from under us, and we went down and down with a rapidity of descent which was almost like falling from a balloon. Then, after another moment's rest in the valley, came the shuddering half apprehension of the next wave as it rose above us, threatening again, and then, after again soaring aloft, down again into the driving of the spray; the old ship rolling, plunging, and now and then quivering, as some side wave struck her, with a complication of motions, sidelong and headlong, the huge waves flying before us and yet carrying us on,—wild motions, rolling, pitching, sinking down the long green slope into the valley, to be flung up into the tumult of wind and wave again. In all this complexity of forces we were as helpless as feathers in the wind, cut off from mother earth as much as if we were carried away on the clouds; the feeling of absolute insignificance growing on one as the ship drove on, the creaking of the ship and the hissing rush of the waters hardly audible for the shrieking of the gale through the rigging. In all my life I have never so understood the utter impotence and triviality of humanity as I felt it then.
The ship, though not in measure with the colossi of later times, was yet a huge mass as measured by the man, and she was no more than a cork on the tide. Up and down she went, like a child's swing,—wallowing and rolling, with the sea breaking over the side till the channels were full, and pouring over the bows in green torrents, and then in blinding deluges of spray and water over the stern; tearing along ten knots an hour, and yet always seeming to be left behind by the waves that tore by us,—the great waves, that obeyed the wind only to be crushed down again by it, spurting up here and there fitfully in pinnacles which were instantly driven off in foam and froth; no combing waves, such as the land dweller sees, for no wave could rise enough to comb,—only great hills of water, crystalline with wavelets, streaked with spun foam, heaving as if from a blind impulse, and leaving us, in a contemptuous toleration, to keep afloat if we could. And now and then two great waves raced each other, as they will at long intervals, till they ran close to each other and united, and we were thrown aloft a little higher, to see nothing more than a wild waste of foam, spray, and watery chaos which defies human language to express it.
This was the sea as I had wanted to see it, and as no painter has ever painted, or probably ever will paint it, and as very few could ever have seen it; for in seventy thousand miles of sea travel I have seen it only once. For three days and nights our captain never left the bridge to rest. Of two other ships that left New York the same day that we did, one was dismasted to the south of us, and the other had her quarters stove in and barely escaped foundering just to the north of us. The gale blew out and left us in a dead calm, which lasted a couple of days, when another gale of three days drove us in the direction we wanted to go, and dropped us off Torquay in the morning of what seemed a delicious spring day, all sunshine and south wind. We hailed a fishing boat and went ashore. We had left a land buried in snow and ice, and we reached one in early spring, though it was still January, the gorse in odorous blossoming, and in the hedgerows the early wild flowers in profusion. But we learned, on landing, that the recent gales had strewn the shores of England with wrecks, with great loss of life. It had been one of those terrible winters which have helped make the British sailor the sea dog he is.
I took lodgings in Charles Street, Middlesex Hospital, near Wehnert, and worked hard. I had brought my "Bed of Ferns," a large study from nature on Saranac Lake, and one or two smaller studies. I had visits from Dante Rossetti, Leighton (then in all the glory of his Cimabue picture, and in the promise of even a greater career than he finally attained), Millais, Val Prinsep, and Boyce. I had brought letters from Lowell to Tom Hughes, from Norton to Arthur Hugh Clough, from Agassiz to Professor Owen. Hughes introduced me to the Cosmopolitan Club, where I made the acquaintance, amongst others whom I do not remember, of Millais and Monckton Milnes.
The artists who came seemed to be interested in my work, especially in the "Bed of Ferns," of which Rossetti—whose opinion I valued more than any other, for he was very honest and blunt in his criticisms, and not at all inclined to flattery—expressed himself in strong terms of praise. As it was the first thing in which I had attempted to introduce a human interest in the landscape, I was naturally inclined to consider it my most important work, and I was dismayed when Ruskin came to see me, and, in a tone of extreme disgust, said, pointing to the dead deer and man: "What do you put that stuff in for? Take it out; it stinks!" My reverence for Ruskin's opinion was such that I made no hesitation in painting out the central motive of the picture, for which both subject and effect of light had been selected. Unfortunately, I habitually used copal varnish as a medium. When Rossetti called again, he asked me, with a look of dismay, what I had done to my picture. I explained to him that on Ruskin's advice I had painted out the figures, and exclaiming, "You have spoiled your picture!" he walked out of the room in a rage. However, I sent it to the Academy as it was, and had it back, "Not hung, for want of room," or something equivalent. I then tried to remove the pigment which hid my figures; but the varnish was refractory, and, after a vain attempt, I finally cut the picture up and stuck it in the fire.
The incident, though it cost me the work of three months, and was in fact the only important outcome of the summer's study, did not diminish my confidence in Ruskin's judgment and correct feeling for art. It required a still more severe experience. As all the world knows, that knows anything of Ruskin's ways with artists, he was blunt and outspoken in his criticisms, and not in the least tender of their feelings, unless indeed they happened to be women. Knowing this, I took his praise for certain studies and drawings I had brought with me as a patent of ability; and though I was never extravagant in my opinion of my own capacities for art, his approbation of some things that I had done, and his assurance of a respectable attainment if I followed the best methods of study, encouraged me, and I took it without question that the methods were his, and it was a costly experience which undeceived me.
Of the people with whom I made acquaintance in London at this visit, those who most interested me were Clough and Owen. Of the artists I saw little, as they and myself had other things to do than to frequent one another's studios; but by the Rossetti family I profited largely, as I had been more or less in intimate relations with William since he undertook the correspondence of "The Crayon" from England. Of Dante, indeed, I saw little at that time, as he lived by himself; but with William my relations were constant and cordial, and he was for many years my most valued English friend. Through his extreme honesty and liberality, and his extensive knowledge of and wide feeling for art, there was great community of appreciation between us, and our friendship lasted long beyond the direct interest I had in English art matters.
Of Christina I saw a good deal, for the hospitality of the Rossetti family was informal and cordial. She was then in excellent health, and, though she was never what would be, by the generality of tastes, considered a beautiful woman, there was a noble serenity and dignity of expression in her face which was, as is often said of women of the higher type of character, "better than beauty," and in which one saw the spiritual exaltation that, without the least trace of the dévote, dominated in her and made her, before all other women of whom I know anything, the poetess of the divine life. The faith in the divine flamed out in her with a mild radiance which had in it no earthly warmth. She attracted me very strongly, but I should as soon have thought of falling in love with the Madonna del Gran Duca as with her. Being myself in the regions of dogmatic faith, I was in a position to judge sympathetically her religion, and, though we differed in tenets as far as two sincere believers in Christianity could, I found in our discussions of the dogmas a broad and affectionate charity in her towards all differences from the ideal of credence she had formed for herself. I do not remember ever meeting any one who held such exalted and unquestioning faith in the true spiritual life as was hers. From my mother, who was in most respects the most purely spiritual woman I have ever known, Christina differed by this serenity, which in my mother was often disturbed by the doubts that had their seeds in the old and superstitious Calvinism mingled with the ground of her creed, and from which she never could liberate herself.