Three generations

On the thirteenth of April, 1861, the day when the news came that Fort Sumter had been attacked, my father wrote the Governor:

I remember the thrill of horror that shook my small person on hearing my father say:

“The Rebels have sent a box of live copperheads and rattlesnakes to Andrew, but fortunately there was something suspicious looking about the box, and no harm is done!”

On another occasion I was shocked at hearing of a case of clothing or bedding, infected with yellow-fever germs, that had been sent to Mr. Lincoln at the White House. Libby Prison seemed very real to us when Alexander MacDonald, D.D.’s son, came home an exchanged prisoner, a shadow of himself, wasted to a skeleton, and with a cough which soon proved fatal. He brought with him a napkin ring made from a piece of meat bone by one of his fellow prisoners. I took this in my hands with a sense of awe; it seemed like a relic.

The Governor took full advantage of my father’s offer of service, and during the next four years he was constantly going back and forth between Boston and Washington. Among his many labors of that time was the work of the Sanitary Commission, of which he was one of the founders and most earnest workers.

His own experience as a young man, when he fought with the hardy mountaineers of Crete in the campaign for Greek independence, fitted him particularly well for the work. It made him, also, rather impatient at the well-meant efforts of the Boston people who, in the kindness of their hearts, sent cargoes of superfluities to the embarrassment of the ill-prepared commissariat department. He writes to Andrew from Washington, soon after the departure of the first Massachusetts regiments:

In speaking of the health of the troops, he writes:

I ought to remember far more about the Civil War than I do, for I was six years old when it was declared. On the nineteenth of November of the same year my mother, before dawn, received the inspiration of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, but I never heard of this till many years later. Two strong impressions of the wartime remain with me. Coming into the breakfast room one morning, I found my brother Harry standing on his chair, fluttering the newspaper over his head, the rest of the family waving their napkins and crying:

“Hurrah! Hurrah! Vicksburg has fallen!”

Harry was then going to Boston Latin School and held a commission in the school regiment.

I shall surely never forget a certain Sunday morning, when I was walking with my father across Boston Common, to get the mail from the post office. It was a lovely spring day; the elms on the Mall wore the softened look that just precedes the time of leafage. We had stopped to scatter some nuts for the squirrels, when a perfect stranger ran up to my father, grasped him by the arm and panted in his ear:

“Doctor Howe, they have killed the President!”

My father staggered as if he had been struck and sank down on a bench, with a cry:

“God Almighty!”

The anguish of his face and voice impressed me quite as much as the fact that President Lincoln had been murdered.

CHAPTER II

The Owls

Mr. James was hurt; this troubled my mother; but my own feelings had been outraged. Wounded in my self-esteem, I had instinctively “struck back”, as a child or savage does. He was so wise, so tender, that I believe he forgave me, though I have never forgiven myself.

In these early memories, the “James boys” figure as the friends of my older sisters. I have no recollection of them in connection with myself till much later. I have, however, a clear impression of their cousin, Minnie Temple, with whom Henry James, the younger, was said to be in love. I think of her delicate face, luminous eyes, and expression of haunting melancholy, as of things seen in a dream. Willie and Wilkie; Henry and Bobby; their names fit into the picture of this time, because my elders talked so much of them. Two went to the war, Wilkie and Bobby; one was wounded.

It probably was about this time that Henry and Willie were studying art in the Newport studio of William Hunt, with John La Farge and Theodora Sedgwick for fellow pupils. This studio still survives. It stands back from Church Street, just behind what is now the Hill Top Inn, then the home of the William, and later of the Richard, Hunts. Until quite lately, I should have said I had no recollection of Mrs. James, wife of the first Henry and mother of the second, but I happened to pass a night at Concord, in the house of Mrs. Robertson James, and there I recognized a portrait of Mrs. James. The face is calm, motherly, and, above all, aristocratic.

The Radical Club, which met on the first Monday of every month, was one of the chief gathering places of the Owls. I remember my mother’s interest in these meetings, and little bits of her talk about them:

“To-day Mr. Emerson read a paper on Religion. He told this anecdote: ‘Somebody said to the Reverend Dr. Payson of Portland, “How much you must enjoy religion, since you live always administering it,” he replied that nobody enjoyed religion less than ministers, as nobody enjoyed food less than cooks.’”

William Rounseville Alger, prince of Owls, was tolerated by me as the father of my dear friend, Kitty Alger, a handsome girl, with fine black hair which she wore “down her back” in three thick braids. She was like her mother, gentle and domestic. The elder daughter, Abbie, was more like her father. She was intelligent, with a gift for languages, which she put to good account in translating foreign books for the Boston publishers.

Children take grown people for granted, accept them as fixed facts like the earth, the heaven, and the stars. They do not analyze them as they do their contemporaries. It was only in later years that I gained a sense of the incongruity of the union between Mr. and Mrs. Alger. They had a large family, and their marriage was, I believe, a happy one in spite of—perhaps on account of—the strong contrasts of tastes and character.

Mr. Alger was a pedantic Unitarian clergyman, and a student of metaphysics. He never, if he could avoid it, used a word of less than five syllables. I remember him at his own house, silent and abstracted; when he was at our house, consorting with other Owls, his language was splendid and free, if a thought paradoxical. A favorite word of his was ratiocination, which Mother once caricatured, exclaiming:

“Ours is indeed a ratty ’orssy nation!”

I was once at the Algers’ when a company of the elect gathered to hear him read from his latest work, “The Poetry of the Orient.” A few of us juveniles sat on the stairs, waiting till the reading should be over and the vanilla ice cream and escalloped oysters appear. Among the grown-up guests were the brilliant Choate sisters, Mrs. Bell, and Mrs. Pratt, cousins of Mrs. Alger’s. In discussing the reading with Mama, Mrs. Pratt exclaimed:

“Brother Alger has his limités and his extensés!” A phrase my mother quoted all her life.

I learned one lesson from “Brother Alger” that I never forgot. I was dining with them one Sunday and, as Mr. Alger plunged the carving fork into the breast of a prodigious turkey, he asked me what part of the bird I preferred. Meaning to be polite, I said I had no choice.

“Then you shall have the drumstick,” was the carver’s answer.

At one time Mr. Alger preached on Sunday mornings at the Music Hall, as years before Theodore Parker had done. He had large audiences—there was too little of ritual to warrant the term “congregation”—chiefly of men. I often went with Kitty to these services; though I did not understand much of what the speaker said, there was something democratic in the large Sunday gathering that appealed to me.

Mr. Edwin Whipple, the brilliant essayist and lecturer, was held to be a very important Owl; because he looked more like Minerva’s bird than any of the others, his solemn expression and round eyes gave him, above all, a claim to the title. There was nothing derogatory in being an Owl; indeed, it was rather “swell” than otherwise. Not all of Mama’s companions were Owls; some of the most learned of them were quite outside the group. The jovial Louis Agassiz, for instance, genial James T. Fields, our dear minister, James Freeman Clarke: these were all intimates and intellectuals, but they lacked something that Frederick Hedge, for example, possessed to a very high degree; just what this essential quality was, I despair of making any grown-up person understand. Though I have mentioned Mr. Emerson as being present at a meeting of that resort of Owls, the Radical Club, he too lacked the subtle characteristic and, though he might at times consort with Owls, he was not of them.

The only female Owl I remember was Miss Elizabeth Peabody, called the grandmother of Boston, one of the most guileless human beings that ever lived. Everybody loved Miss Peabody and, loving her so much, everybody talked about her. Some of the things they said were tender, some were funny, but none were slighting, none bitter.

There was the tradition that Miss Peabody had been affianced to the great romancer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who soon after their engagement discovered that her younger sister, Sophia, was his true affinity. With perfect sweetness and generosity, Elizabeth yielded her lover to her sister and, as long as they lived, devoted herself to the Hawthornes and their children.

It takes a pretty big woman to do that!

A friend of Miss Peabody’s once dreamed that she had a baby, which she soon mislaid, finding it long after shut up between the pages of a big volume, where she had put it for a bookmark. In her later years, she looked like a female Pickwick; you could read the record of her blameless life in her benign face. Though she was a hard worker, she was never able “to put anything by”, probably because so much of her work was for the causes and reforms she served so whole-heartedly. In her last years, when she was too feeble to work, my mother was very anxious about her future. Miss Peabody reassured her, however.

“My dear friend,” she began, “I have been thinking to-day how much better off I am than Croesus (a well-known millionaire). He and I left the country town where we were both born, on the same day, and came to Boston to seek our fortunes. Croesus made a great deal of money, but in such a questionable manner that he no longer finds it pleasant to live in Boston and has moved to a distant state where public opinion doesn’t trouble itself about the origin of his fortune. I, on the other hand, live on happily in Boston, supported by an income provided by my old scholars.”

Croesus probably would not have agreed with her summing up of the case, but, as their two faces rise out of the limbo of these early memories, old Elizabeth’s, all alight with innocence and enthusiasm, smiles at me, while Croesus looks coolly and cannily at me, with the hard eyes and tight mouth of a miser.

The Hawthornes were very poor in their early married life at Concord. They could not afford to keep a servant, and divided the housework between them. One day Mrs. Hawthorne, happening to be near the pantry, where her husband was doing his share of the morning’s work, heard him exclaim, as he threw down the knife he had been cleaning:

“Thank God, that’s the last of those damned knives!”

This impressed the young wife so much that she managed soon after to employ a domestic. Shortly after, Pegasus, released from the butcher’s cart, spread his wings and carried Hawthorne far above household drudgery, for not long after this “The Scarlet Letter” was written.

I do not remember ever having seen Hawthorne, but I have a strong impression of how he looked, from my mother’s description of him. She spoke of his great reserve and shyness, of his beauty and especially of his eyes, “like blue-gray sapphires.”

The spell he cast over my childhood is strong as ever. He first introduced me to the friends from Hellas and made me free of the enchanted circle of Greek mythology. For many years I held the absurd belief that his genius created the characters in Tanglewood Tales, where I first read of Midas and the Golden Touch, of Perseus, Medusa, the Graiae, and Bellerophon. Nowhere, I still believe, is the story of Baucis and Philemon and their immortal guests more beautifully told than in Tanglewood Tales. These two volumes, in Ticknor and Field’s familiar brown bindings, were in the nursery bookcase, and made me early familiar with Hawthorne’s name. Chancing upon “The Scarlet Letter” one day in my father’s library, I read the great romance with the same avidity with which I had devoured the children’s stories. I was too young to understand the significance of the Letter itself; the story held me no less entranced because I missed the inner meaning. It is a great mistake to think that children must understand things to enjoy them; mystery, above all else, appeals to them.

Una Hawthorne, the eldest daughter, once made us a visit at Lawton’s Valley. She was tall and handsome, with a skin like alabaster and masses of red-gold hair. Julian, the only son, was of the same type. He was one of the handsomest young men I ever saw,—tall, athletic, romantic-looking, with a touch of unconventionality in his dress that was very becoming. Later in life, I met Julian Hawthorne, when I visited my sister Florence in Plainfield, where he lived for some years. One remark of his I have always remembered. We had been speaking of the elder Hawthorne, and Julian said, with a sigh: “My father is the worst enemy I have. It would not be so bad if I had chosen a different calling, but whatever I write must always be compared with what he wrote!”

I felt a certain sympathy with him; a great name is very hard to “live up to.”

The mention of the nursery bookcase recalls certain priceless volumes I do not often find to-day in the nurseries I visit. As our books were chosen by my mother with greatest care, I hope by mentioning some of my earliest book friends to hand on a good tradition:

“The King of the Golden River” by Ruskin; Hans Andersen’s “Little Rudy”; “The Huggermuggers and Kobbletozo” by Christopher Cranch; Grimm’s Tales; Mrs. Barbauld’s Poems; Bulfinch’s “Age of Fable”; Edward Lear’s immortal “Book of Nonsense”; “Alice in Wonderland”, “The Bab Ballads”, the Franconia Stories, and Kingsley’s “Water Babies”; to the authors of every one of these books I owe an imperishable debt. If you have never read them there is still time, for they are for every age and condition!

CHAPTER III

Green Peace

A few rods from the house, halfway across the garden, gleamed the white columns of the greenhouse and bowling alley. Here reigned Mr. Arrow, guardian of Muscat and Black Hamburg grapes, Maréchal Niel and Banksia roses, starry jasmines, camellias white and red and mottled. At Green Peace time was not reckoned by weeks or months, but by the successive blooming of tree, plant, and flower.

“When did we have the first party last year?”

“The day the pink hawthorn came out.”

There were many parties for us, especially in the spring, when city folks like to go into the country.

The hawthorns, pink and white, were first to blossom, closely followed by the scarlet pyrus japonica, the snowballs, yellow laburnums—sweet as honey—acacias, lilacs, syringa, and spiraea. The beds were filled with old-fashioned flowers,—roses, mignonette, peonies, verbenas, love-lies-bleeding, mourning bride, and lilies, lilies, lilies, from the early lily-of-the-valley to the latest hardy variety. What strawberries grew here! Papa quoted with the opening of each season the bishop’s saying:

“Doubtless God might have made a better berry; doubtless He never did!”

What cherries he raised for us, black hearts and white hearts. What peaches, apricots, plums, apples, pears,—especially pears; Green Peace pears were famous. The fruit room at the top of the house was a pleasant place in the autumn when the pears were gathered, sorted, and placed on narrow shelves to ripen. Has my memory kept their sequence aright? Bartlett, Seckel, Beurré Bosc, Duchesse d’Angoulême, Louise bonne—prized for its single scarlet cheek—Winter Nelis—they lasted into spring—and the Vicar of Wakefield; I could not like the Vicar, he was so ugly!

Mrs. George Sage, a friend of these days, lately said to me:

“Your father gave me the most delicious pear I ever tasted, in the Green Peace garden. Do you remember the Chinese junk?”

Do I remember!

Listen to the song of the junk, as its great hulk swings faster and faster, back and forth, back and forth, while the passengers, twoscore tatterdemalions, sing riotously:

“Here we go up, up, up; now we go down, down, downey!”

The junk creaks and grumbles a minor accompaniment, accentuated by Friskey’s staccato “Bow, wow, wow!”

Friskey was a short-haired Irish terrier, with an expressive stump of a tail; Fanny and Lion were big Newfoundlands, and Brownie was the great St. Bernard, bred at the famous Hospice and educated at a Swiss dog school. These are the Green Peace dogs I best remember. Brownie was not of this time, but of many years later; I speak of him now, lest I forget. He was the handsomest, best, most intelligent dog I ever knew. Compared to other dogs, he was what a highly polished university man is to a rough day laborer. Brownie was a hero, too; he saved the life of Honey-pot—but that’s another story.

In the cow barn lived the red cow and her calf. She was a famous milker, giving her sixteen quarts regularly. In the stable there were horses. Papa rode like a centaur. To see him mounted on his black mare Breeze, cantering along Bird Lane, was a revelation of grace and skill I have yet to see surpassed by Bedouin of the desert or Hyde Park dandy.

My little brother is closely linked with these memories of Green Peace. Can I remember it, or do I remember my mother’s telling me of this conversation between her and me?

“Mama, I am sorry you are so old!”

“Why, darling?”

“Because you cannot play with me!”

This was just before little Sam’s birth, when she, nimblest of playfellows, was weary with carrying her precious burthen:

“The hyacinthine boy, for whom Morn well might break and April bloom.”

His little life, four short years, has been told by his mother in what I believe to be a unique biography. He was a large handsome boy, full of vitality and charm. His death of diphtheritic croup, at the age of four, brought a desolation to our house, which, after all these years, I recall as if it had lately happened. My clearest memory of him is lying surrounded by flowers, a beautiful little marble figure, with lovely, half-closed violet eyes. A portrait preserves this last look. It always hung, framed by a wreath of thorns, in his mother’s room. There is frequent mention of him in her diary; until the end of her long life, she saw him in her dreams. Her poems show the closeness of the bond between her and—

We had been three pairs; Julia and Flossie, Harry and Laura, Maud and Sam. I was now left an odd number. The elder children seemed much older; later the dividing years shrank to nothing. They were all precocious; I was the reverse. My mother used to comfort me by saying, “The oak is a tree of slow growth!”

They all talked glibly together in Sdrawkcab (“Backwards”) a language I could not understand. The compensation for all this was that I was a great deal with both parents and their friends, though I remember Mama’s sometimes “borrowing a child” to play with me. The earliest letter I have from my father is written in sdrawkcab. To this day I am unable to understand the words, but the thought is plain: he was trying to help his youngest to enter into the elder children’s play. A letter from him to my Aunt Annie Mailliard written in 1864, describes us at this time.

“Julia does not grow older.

“Dudekins (Julia Romana) is in perfect and brilliant health and has grown so affectionate and loving to me that she seems more angel than human. Flossie grows in grace and good sense, and is as ever an upright and downright honest soul. Harry is a hobbledehoy—que voulez vous—of one who is neither man nor boy? Laura is not so robust as the others, but she is very handsome, graceful, intelligent, and good. Maud the Flibberty-gibbet is a nugget—solid, heavy, elastic, indefatigable. She promises to be the brightest, handsomest, and wildest of all. There, dear Annie, I have mentioned all—all but the one who has gone before us, the best beloved; of whom I never think without suffering anguish: you and those who know the same mystery of sorrow understand—but which to all others is inexplicable.”

In these early years I knew nothing of my mother’s people, but was on good terms with my father’s. His sister, my aunt Jeannette, and her husband, Thomas B. Wales, lived at the time I am writing of at the Tremont House, a sober granite building, on the corner of Tremont and Beacon streets, whose windows looked out on the Old Granary Burying Ground on one side, and the King’s Chapel graveyard on the other. Aunt Jeannette was a large handsome woman, with blue eyes like Papa’s, thick, classically waved, gray hair, and a closely corsetted figure. She was a shy and silent person. When Papa took me to see her on Sunday afternoons, there was little conversation between them. She kept a supply of brittle molasses and pink cinnamon candies for visiting nieces and nephews. If I were left alone with her, she would startle me with the question:

“Do you love your father?”

I adored my father; the question was nettling as implying doubts, I could not be made to answer it.

The Howes are reserved and silent people, little given to talking of themselves or their concerns. How sorry I am that I did not learn more about my father’s youth and ancestry from Aunt Jeannette. When my sister Laura came to write my father’s life, she gathered some interesting facts concerning his descent:

“His grandfather, Edward Compton Howe, was one of the ‘Indians’ of the Boston Tea Party. His father, Joseph Neals Howe, was a maker of ropes and cordage, and had a large ropewalk near the site of the present Public Garden. This business was, at one time, extremely profitable, and my grandfather prospered in it; but in the War of 1812 he had the misfortune to supply the United States Government with large quantities of ropes and cordage, for which he was never paid.... His mother was of the family of Jeremy and Richard Gridley, the former attorney-general of the royal province of Massachusetts Bay, who served at the taking of Louisburg, fortified Bunker Hill the night before the battle, and, under Washington’s orders, aided in preparing the siegeworks which finally drove the British from Boston.”[1]

My father’s only living brother was Joseph Howe, spoken of as Uncle Hpesoj (the h mute as in hour) according to the rules of Sdrawkcab. He was a tall fair man who wore a high collar, an imposing stock, ruffled shirts, elaborate waistcoats, a handsome fob and seals attached to a great gold warming-pan of a repeater, which rang the hours with a delicate chime. He was a successful merchant, and at this time president of the Sandwich Glass Company. He lived in a fine house, Number 4 Ashburton Place, where he reigned supreme over Aunt Eliza and “the girls”, my three Howe cousins, Anjie, Eliza, and Maria. Martha, his eldest daughter, by a former marriage, was the wife of the genial Austin Parks and the mother of the dear Parks cousins: William, known as Mungo; Maud, my particular crony; and Lilian, then a baby. Uncle Hpesoj lived in far greater state than the rest of the family. His house, his dress, everything that was his had the stamp of sober wealth. He owned a pew in King’s Chapel; his wife and daughters took their exercise in a fine barouche, drawn by two stout horses. The atmosphere of the house at Ashburton Place was as different as possible from our own ambiente. The storeroom was an impressive cave; the upper shelves laden with neatly labeled jars of jams, syrups, and preserves. On the lower shelves stood japanned boxes containing stores, and large blue paper cones called sugar loaves. Saturday morning the week’s supply of loaf sugar was cut up with a sharp little saw and the house was filled with the aroma of roasting coffee.

This was a perfectly kept house, where the domestic arts were carried to a high degree of perfection. My father coveted for his daughters all these niceties of housewifery and tried—oh, how he tried—to have us learn them! Julia Romana, our eldest, would have learned these things, had it been possible for her to do so; there was no sacrifice she would not have made for her father. Her nature was a straight blend of her parents; poet and philanthropist. Like Mama, she was a passionate student, wrote verses, plays, romances, because she could not help it. Like Papa, she devoted her life to the education of the blind. Watch a mother duck with her brood, and you will see how the young get their education, by imitation. The children of eagles are eaglets; eagle parents cannot hope to raise a brood of doves!

On Thanksgiving we dined at Ashburton Place. The extension mahogany table filled the great room, for the family gathering was a large one. After the opening course of oyster soup, an immense roast turkey was placed at one end of the table before Uncle Hpesoj, a twin bird, boiled, with white sauce before Aunt Eliza. The third course, like the third act in a play, brought the psychological moment; a lighted silver blazer was placed before each guest, who proceeded to cook his own venison, with currant jelly and other condiments to taste.

The table was decorated with glass flagons and goblets, rose, ruby, pale and dark green, some covered with gold arabesques, triumphs of the Sandwich Glass Factory. With dessert came the thin pink finger bowls; the children dipped their fingers and rubbed them round and round the rims, producing a faint elfin music I never hear without a vision of the Ashburton Place dining room, my tall dignified uncle, his little silver-haired mate, and Eliza, the beauty of the family.

A few years ago, motoring from Newport to Buzzard’s Bay, the way led through a fine old town, full of colonial houses and wide streets lined by magnificent elms.

“What’s this place?” I asked.

“East Sandwich”, the name blew back from the lips of our host, who drove the machine. Soon we passed a huge brick factory, with broken windows, smokeless chimneys, deserted, forlorn, yet with something that spoke of past greatness.

“Uncle Hpesoj’s glass factory!”

Whirling along the sand dunes, I have no eyes for the scenery; I see the old factory alive again, with smoking chimneys, glowing forges, swarms of swarthy Bohemians. A dark-eyed hairy man dips a blowpipe in a molten mass, twirls it quickly in both hands till a sort of blob forms at the end, puts the tube to his mouth and blows a rainbow bubble, to show a group of wondering children how Bohemian glass is made.

Uncle Hpesoj was a stockholder in the Boston Theater and often allowed our family the privilege of using his excellent seats. Mama, who as a child had been forbidden the theater, took great pains that we should see the best plays and best acting of our time. Wednesday and Saturday matineés at the Boston are among the most vivid memories of these years. The splendors of the great theater were still undimmed. The drop curtain, representing the Lake of Lugano, gave me so high an idea of Italian scenery that when I saw the real Lake of Lugano I was, somehow, disappointed.

My first play was “Jocko, the Brazilian”, a pantomime, acted by the Ravels. Jocko, the hero, a wise brown ape, saves the heroine from drowning, only to be rewarded by a careless bullet that ends his life. When dear brown Jocko fell mortally wounded to the ground, his life blood—a bunch of scarlet cotton wool—ebbing from his side, I fell into such a paroxysm of weeping that I still remember the pain of it, when some real sorrows are forgotten. My first opera was “Norma”; all I remember is my amazement when the stout Italian prima donna, over whose death I had shed such bitter tears, came before the curtain at the end of the performance to receive her share of the applause. I have had many such shocks since and have still to be convinced that anything so inartistic is pardonable.

My first tragedy was “The Iron Chest”, with Edwin Booth in the part of Edward Mortimer. I have seen most of the great actors of my time, and I have never seen one who equaled Booth, in tragedy, comedy, or melodrama.

“I do remember an apothecary—and hereabouts he dwells!”

Orlando Tompkins, the intimate friend of Booth, kept an apothecary shop at the corner of West and Washington streets, close by the Boston Theater. Booth was then the matinée idol; and the young ladies, who wrote him poems and letters, often left them at the apothecary’s, where he usually dropped in after the play. One day a silly woman sent him a gold chain in a letter, telling her messenger to wait outside and see what happened. Booth strolled in at the usual time, found the letter, broke the seal, read the contents, tossed the letter into the stove; twirling the chain in his hand for a moment, as if puzzled what to do with it, he strode across the shop and fastened it round the neck of the great Maltese cat that lay asleep in the window.

Next to Green Peace and the Boston Theater, I felt more at home at the Boston Music Hall than in any other place of my small world. To-day Boston has a fine Symphony Hall, an admirable Opera House; to some persons of my generation, neither compares in importance to the Music Hall, built two years before I was born, by that pioneer society, the Harvard Musical Association. The same year, 1852, Dwight’s Journal of Music was founded. In both enterprises the leading figure was John Sullivan Dwight, president of the association, editor of the journal. There is a certain romance connected with the very inception of Music Hall. Jenny Lind was coming to Boston; the city had no fitting auditorium for so great an artist. A few lovers of music got together, raised the money, and built the hall in what was then “record time.”

Between the ages of six and twenty years, I haunted the Music Hall, in company with my adopted son, John Dwight. At the time of his adoption I was seven, and Mr. Dwight was fifty years old. We celebrated the event by going to the dedication of the great organ at the Music Hall. For me it is still the greatest of organs, though I have been to Haarlem and Freiburg. I recognized in the crowd that filled the hall some of the “founders”; Charles C. Perkins, blue-eyed, golden-haired, seraphic in temper as well as face; Doctor Baxter Upham, Mr. Robert Apthorp, Mr. George Derby, and the architect, our friend, George Snell, an Englishman who lived many years in Boston.

For months we had watched the slow upbuilding of the organ, seen the golden pipes unpacked, tested, and laid

in a row on the stage. Now everything was in place, the mouths of the painted singing women seemed ready to breathe out music. A pair of mighty colossi bore the weight of the massive front on their bowed heads and shoulders. Before the organ stood the bronze statue of Beethoven, now in Symphony Hall.

“Crawford’s statue seems to be listening to the music,” my mother whispered, as the organist struck the keys and a lovely air of Palestrina’s rolled from the organ, shaking the souls of the men and women gathered in this temple of the arts. Music must have its commercial side, like all other arts; but in those days, if it were there, it was hidden. The men who built the Music Hall, and who made Boston the musical center it still remains, were true servants of Apollo.

Mr. Dwight had access to Music Hall at all times. So devouring was his thirst for music that it was not enough to hear all the concerts by the Handel and Hayden, Harvard Musical, Cecilia, and other societies; he must hear all the rehearsals too. Not finished performances, like the so-called Friday afternoon rehearsals of the present Boston Symphony orchestra, but the working rehearsals, when Carl Zerrahn, our favorite leader, schooled his musicians, scolded his chorus, and made them repeat difficult passages over and over again. Mr. Dwight’s attitude towards his fellow man was one of gentle toleration, with one exception,—for those who set up false gods in the house of music, he had no mercy. He drove them from the temple with the scourge of his bitter pen. Dwight’s Journal arrived at our house every Saturday; its contents were discounted by those who had sat beside the oracle at the week’s concerts and already knew his opinion of artists and composers. It developed, even to my intelligence, that the oracle was but yet a man. When he wrote about a pretty woman, like that bewitching girl pianist, Adelaide Topp, his style showed a warmth that was lacking when he spoke of the black-avised Fraulein Osterauer, with nothing but her technique to recommend her. During intermissions, or at close of concerts, we went to the greenroom, to meet the artists. In this way, I have shaken hands with most of the great artists of the time. To see Christine Nilsson close, and catch the strange glint in those eyes of heavenly blue, was an unforgettable experience. Her pale gold hair was more beautiful even than on the stage; her beauty, like her voice, spoke of her own northland, gleaming ice peaks, frozen fiords, diamond-bright winter stars, moonlight upon snow.

Madame Essipoff—Russian, I think—though not beautiful, had a sympathetic personality.

“No woman ever had such a left hand for the piano,” our Nestor said of her. We highly approved of Camilla Urso, then in her early fame, and Theresa Carreño, a beautiful young woman, who fingered her instrument with the grace of a Fra Angelico angel. The oracle set his face sternly against certain male virtuosi; musical fireworks were not tolerated by Dwight’s Journal. When I hung entranced upon Ole Bull’s playing of some composition, written expressly to show the amazing dexterity of his bowing, the oracle frowned and exclaimed, “Claptrap!”

Mr. Dwight was severely classical in his taste and admitted new composers grudgingly. He lived in a world created by the early composers and loved, I think, above all others, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. To opera, he was not only indifferent, but hostile; unless it was “Don Giovanni”, “Fidelio”, the “Magic Flute”, or “Orpheus and Eurydice.” He spoke of the opera as the “siren.” Ravenously as I devoured the immense store of musical knowledge he so generously shared with me, I could not stop my ears to the siren’s voice. He never forgave me for going to “Ernani”, when he had invited me to Bach’s “Passion Music.” As an exception to his rule, Mr. Dwight took the keenest interest in a performance of “Oberon”, at the Music Hall, with Madame Parepa in the soprano part. We went to all the rehearsals. In the overture, “the horns of elfland faintly blowing” are heard, first at a great distance, then nearer, and last, just outside the castle gate. To produce the effect of distance, the trumpeter was sent to a remote part of the building to sound his horn. At the first rehearsal there was a pause at this point; Zerrahn looked up to the part of the balcony where we sat, and asked:

“How was that?”

“Not quite faint enough,” said the oracle. “No, no, not half faint enough,” murmured his adopted mother, much puffed up with pride.

There were other occasions at Music Hall even more exciting than the oratorios and symphony concerts,—the prize drills and declamations of the Boston Latin School. As my father and my brother Harry were both Latin School boys, we felt bound to uphold this institution and look down upon its upstart rival, the English High School.

On the floor of the Music Hall, the boys in blue presented arms, carried arms, shouldered arms, wheeled and marched, and wheeled again. I see their shining schoolboy faces, set and serious, their slim young bodies strained and alert, moving in perfect rhythm to the word of command. The galleries bloomed with schoolgirls in fresh Easter finery, gazing eagerly down at the marching lads. The battalion had four companies that drilled regularly during the autumn and winter, in the armory over the old Boylston Market. In the spring the drilling took place on the Common. The Prize Drill of the year 1871 was of especial interest on account of the officers. The Colonel was Lester W. Clark; Adjutant, George Monks; First Lieutenant, Francis Dumaresq; Second Lieutenant, Henry Warren. The Colonel had borrowed, for the occasion, a gold-mounted sword and a crimson sash; I well remember how becoming they were!

Girls who had brothers sometimes attended the monthly Public Saturday at the old Latin School on Bedford Street. At the end of the hall stood an allegorical figure by my friend, the sculptor, Mr. Richard Greenough, commemorating the graduates who fell in the Civil War. The speaker’s platform was just in front of this memorial. Parents, friends, and girls occupied the benches, facing the rostrum. I remember one of the Saturday mornings, when Lester Clark recited Mrs. Norton’s “Bingen on the Rhine” and Frank Dumaresq gave, with great effect, the Tower Scene from “King John.”

A program of the Prize Declamation of May 27th, 1871, has been preserved. The opening number was “Harold the Dauntless”, given in great style by “Carty” Fenno. My kinsman, Morton Prince, recited William Everett’s “Themistocles.” The “Daughter of Herodias” was sympathetically interpreted by Dumaresq; and the “Burial of Dundee” by Colonel Lester Clark. After the award of prizes, Gilmore’s Band played “Fair Harvard.”

We sometimes condescended to attend the Chauncy Hall School’s “Declamations”, to hear George Riddle’s fine recitations. Riddle was a beautiful boy, with a poetic face and fiery brown eyes. I was present when he won his first prize by his recitation of the Dagger Scene from “Macbeth.” Riddle became a professional reader later on, and I never missed an occasion to hear him recite. As an actor he had no success, with one great exception: his acting in “Oedipus Tyrannus”, at Harvard, was a notable dramatic achievement.

The chief figure at all public functions of Latin School was the head master, Francis Gardner, tall, thin, spectacled, with eyes that looked a boy through and through and an uncanny flair for mischief. It was said that he ruled “with a rod of iron and a cotton umbrella.” Though the boys feared, hated, and talked flippantly of him as “Old Gardner”, after they left school they were apt to confess to a sneaking fondness for their old master. When they had sons of their own, they have been known to declare that they loved and honored him. William Hunt’s portrait shows the man exactly as I remember him,—tall, gaunt, severe, lovable too, and at the first glance recognizable as a splendid specimen of the schoolmaster of fifty years ago. The modern educators, I know, have many qualities that he lacked; but they have lost something that Mr. Gardner possessed. They rule with the olive branch, where he ruled with the birch rod. Boston Latin School, under Francis Gardner, was a very different place from the Happy Valley of Rasselas schools, where to-day most of my young friends receive their education. These schools are delightful places for parents and aunts to visit; but are they not a trifle “soft” to fit a youth for the rough and tumble of the great world?

CHAPTER IV

Schools and Teachers

On leaving Miss Peabody’s Kindergarten, I went to Mr. Henry Williams’ school in Temple Place. The entrance was extremely mysterious to me. To reach the classrooms, we passed through a paved inclosed court and up a long flight of stairs, to a shadowy corridor that always depressed me. I was not exactly afraid of it, as of the passage outside my room inhabited by the foxes, nor did any hairy beast lurk there, as under the staircase at Number 13 Chestnut Street, but it was uncanny and I took care not to pass in or out alone.

I remember little of what I learned at the Temple Place School but a deal about Mr. Williams, a commanding figure, in spite of such personal defects, as a lump on his forehead and a missing forefinger. He had a musical voice and a sort of masterful sweetness that won the heart of every child. On Sundays he led the singing at the “Indiana Place Chapel”, the first home of the Church of the Disciples, where my mother’s beloved friend, James Freeman Clarke, was the pastor. The older girls were taught by Mr. Williams, but I was in the primary department, presided over by Miss Paul, a little lady who looked more like a brown wren than a schoolma’am.

For me, the school of schools was the Hilliards’ at Number 113 Mount Vernon Street, kept by Miss Julia and Miss Miriam Hilliard. Their mother, one understood, had met with “reverses.” Whatever their nature, they had left her dependent on her daughters. Mrs. Hilliard was super-stately, remote, kindly, and painstaking in her dealings with us. She wore stupendous corkscrew ringlets that must have taken hours every morning to arrange. She gave me music lessons. Half-past nine found me in the Hilliard “best parlor”, seated on an embroidered revolving stool before the square piano, with the metronome tick-tacking beside me.

“One, two, three—keep the wrists low, raise the fingers high; one, two, three; one, two, three!” I can feel the touch of the bamboo rod now, as she places my hands in the proper position above the keyboard.

After the music lesson came arithmetic.

“No, Maud, seven times nine do not make fifty-four. Try again!”

This from Miss Julia, firmly holding my wandering gaze with her great smoldering eyes. I can only look and look, with almost a lover’s gaze, at the glorious wave of her dusky hair swept back from the perfect brow, and calculate the weight of the great shining coil at the nape of her neck. When she smiles, the sight of her small perfect teeth, and the dimple that breaks the oval of her olive cheek, stir me to a mighty effort. For her—not for Greenleaf—I master the multiplication table; for her bend the full force of my will to make a fair copy of the wise sentences, written out in her neat pointed hand. On Saturday mornings, I am the first to arrive and place my little chair close to hers for the sewing lesson.

“There is no choice; the thimble always on the third finger of the right hand. Do not pucker the cloth; hold the two edges firmly together, the stitch not too deep.” So Miss Julia exhorts, while I bend my obstinate fingers in a desperate effort to sew a fine seam; and in the end learn, after a fashion, to hem, over and over, stitch, backstitch, buttonhole, darn,—all, all for her!

“Half-past eleven. Recess. Have a good play; bring me back some roses in your cheeks!”

So she dismisses us to those quiet streets of Beacon Hill, where we are safe in our romping as in a walled garden. Those in funds rush round the corner, to break breathlessly into Marm Horn’s tiny shop on Charles Street; she is waiting for us, her eye on the clock. The Marm wears shining brown side curls, that fit neatly into the hollows of her sallow cheeks. She is slim and rather elegant in her stiff alpaca apron and black silk half-mits.

“What’s the good word to-day?” Her invariable greeting.

The best word was “Jessups”, but that implied five cents in your pocket, which purchased a very thick stick of candy, done up in brown paper, stamped chocolate, lemon, or strawberry. For two cents, you got a stick of black molasses candy and a pickled lime from the big bowl, like a goldfish’s, in the window. It took courage, as well as bravado, to eat that bitter lime, bought solely because at home all pickled “abominations” were forbidden.

Our pennies safely invested, the whole troop rushes headlong uphill, to Louisburg Square, the nerve-center of the great game of “I spy.” The first to arrive takes possession of the granite doorsteps of Number One (the Russell house); the others stand on the pavement in a circle, to be “counted.” As soon as “It” is chosen, she takes her place on the doorsteps, and, with closed eyes, recites in a loud singsong: