| Biography |
A LITTLE BOOK OF FRIENDS by Harriet Prescott Spofford
Boston: Little, Brown, 1916.
What are friends for, but to divine
Fairest and finest that we are,
And think in all our glances shine
The morning and the evening star!
I ANNIE FIELDS
II SARAH ORNE JEWETT
III ANNE WHITNEY
IV CELIA THAXTER
V GAIL HAMILTON
VI MARY LOUISE BOOTH
VII JANE ANDREWS and LOUISA STONE HOPKINS
VIII ROSE TERRY COOKE
IX LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON
WHEN I first saw Annie Fields, she had come with Mr. Fields to take me on a long drive, and she was a vision of youth and beauty, -- with the peach bloom on her lovely cheek, the gleam in her brown eyes, with a luxuriance of jacinth-colored hair whose innumerable dark waves broke full of glancing golden lights, -- of exceeding feminine grace withal, a tall, regnant young being, as she stood at the end of our drive, in her blue gown against the blue sea. When I last saw her, she had again come to take me to drive, no longer in the high estate of the young queen, but with a countenance as beautiful in its pallor, the eyes as brown and soft, the outlines as firm, the hair still carrying its glints of gold under its slight powdering, the teeth still pearly white and transparent, the smile as irradiating, the grace of movement as perfect, but all silvered with the frost of age.
Annie Fields was born in Boston, in one of those houses with deep gardens long since lost in the business centers. Her father was Doctor Adams, an eminent physician. She was married, when very young, to Mr. James T. Fields, a remarkable publisher and man of letters, a person of great wit and graciousness. After a little they went abroad, and at the time they came for me, they had just returned from a long European stay, where Mrs. Fields's advantages were those which few young girls have ever received. Her husband had taken her among the friends he had already made; she had visited at Tennyson's, in the Isle of Wight, had been intimate with the Brownings, in Florence, had walked in Landor's garden there by the old poet's side, had had the rapture and regret of Rome, with Charlotte Cushman and William Story -- where even the people of the street called her La Bella Donna -- had had the best of London, and much of the finest and the richest that Europe had to give.
Returning to Boston, her beautiful home on Charles Street, -- with its garden running down to the river, with its wide view over miles of water to the distant hills, with its vast and lovely library, lined with books and pictures and busts of unique attraction, -- became the haunt of our chief poets, wits, and writers, players and workers, -- Lowell and Longfellow and Holmes and Emerson and Agassiz and Felton and Whipple, to number no more, being its familiars. There also came every one of significance from abroad, to be received with the delightful bonhomie and boundless hospitality of the host, with the bright and fine bearing of the hostess, to rest in the soft green shadows by the low fire and among the abundant flowers. The power of such association on a young, tender, and sensitive spirit, overflowing with poetry and the love of beauty, could not but be enriching and stimulating, and she was every day and all the time in the company of the clear intellect and sweet nature of a man to whom such as Wordsworth and Christopher North and De Quincey and Rogers and Barry Cornwall and Leigh Hunt and Tennyson and Thackeray and Dickens and Charles Reade and Keats's Severn and Doctor John Brown and others, a shining host, indeed, overseas as well as in our own land, had given their friendship.
In her memoir of her husband, written when she could command her powers after he had gone and taken half of her life with him into the unseen, she portrayed the strength and fineness, the rare quality, the rich experiences, of Mr. Fields, to live with whom was itself an enlightening and ennobling fortune. He cared tenderly for her genius, which he early discovered, and together they made their home a place of delight. Your eye never failed to be met there by some new treasure of a separate fascination, now a bust of Charlotte Cushman by Emma Stebbins, her other self; now a charcoal sketch of William Hunt's, now a Zamacois, flaming with barbaric color and fantastic thought, now an old portrait of Pope, painted by the master of Sir Joshua Reynolds, now a volume of Pope, owned once by Mr. Lincoln, now a priceless edition of Blake, now a boyish and beautiful portrait of Dickens, with prints and photographs and autographs and letters and literary curiosities without number, to be found nowhere else in the world but in that house. What its bookshelves held, Mrs. Fields herself made partly apparent in her interesting papers about them.
And never did one home receive such guests. Perhaps the room you occupied Ole Bull had slept in the night before you came, and Hawthorne would sleep in the night after you went; and both of them had watched the stars and twinkling lights in the purple waters of the bay, as you had done. Perhaps Whittier or Bayard Taylor was across the hall. You went out of the door as Mr. Curtis or William Hunt or Colonel Higginson came in, as Sothern or Fechter or Artemus Ward went out before you. It was Clara Kellogg or Christine Nillson or Celia Thaxter or Rebecca Harding or Mrs. Stowe, that you found your vis-a-vis at breakfast or at dinner. Everything in the house moved in such responsive harmony under the hand of its young mistress and her exquisite and sensitive refinement, that it was always the house beautiful. Here you heard the latest word from the world of books and book-men, and caught the first glimmer of the phantoms of new individualities, and indeed the last from those great shadows sinking below our horizon. Some shadows seemed to come very near, as when Mr. Fields recounted Kenyon's tale that, while stopping at a mountain inn, he saw the diligence drive up, and a pale young man spring down from it, and another pale young man run out from the inn to meet the first one, throwing his arms about him and kissing him on both cheeks; and one pale young man was Byron, and the other pale young man was Shelley. You felt that you had almost touched them with your hand, and remembered Browning and the eagle's feather.
Annie Fields gave the first public evidence of her literary power in the Ode that she wrote to be read by Charlotte Cushman on the occasion of the unveiling of the great organ in the Music Hall of Boston, which was quite a splendid ceremonial. The Ode was a fine, fresh piece of work, spontaneous and full, with pleasant pictures, and little rills of music and widening effects of noble, rolling lines. It was some years before she printed privately -- for her work has been marked by a shrinking modesty -- the "Return of Persephone", a touching and beautiful version of the old myth, marked here by clarity and pure delightfulness, and there by grandeur of thought and expression, its atmosphere and phrase reminding one constantly of Shelley's, although borrowing nothing from him. Its third act rises to sublimity, with passages of the prescience which belongs only to genius. There is many a burst of music in it. How tender and dainty is this little cradle song:
"Coo, coo, coo, chanteth the mother of doves!
Rocked in the arms of the trees the drowsy birds are asleep,
Rocked in the arms of thy mother, who ever a watch doth keep,
Coo, coo, my baby, sweetest of all the loves!"But neither poetry nor the duties and delights of her home could absorb all the thought and time of this full-hearted creature. Early in her life the woes of the outer world took possession of her, in the midst of her own shelter from every wind that blew, basking in the receipt of love and worship. She was always sending comfort to those sitting in darkness; and the words that Demeter spoke to her Persephone were the keynote of her life:
"But as thou goest pluck blossoms from thy path
And strew them in the places without bloom."Her work in the charities of Boston extended through more than a quarter of a century of devotion to those in need, and a valuable little book which she wrote upon the best ways of affording help to the poor has become a manual upon the subject.
In 1881 she published a volume of verses, "Under the Olive", that might fitly be called poems for poets, to be read with the poetic insight and confidence. All the poems in the book were built upon lofty lines. The Greek legend had attracted her strongly; often she treated it in the severe Greek spirit, and then again with wealth of modern feeling and color. Every myth and story is interpenetrated with new meaning; sometimes one feels an elusive charm, as if a thought of ethereal loveliness were just escaping; and every page has a calmness of expression where is never any struggle for effect, and which seems in such sympathy with the ordered ways of beauty that startling line or figure would break the spell. Meanwhile, the felicities of description are many, as when she speaks of the "Briny perfumes of the Eastern gale". or notes the waning moon,
"Hanging, a fragment of mist, faint on the forehead of day,"
or tells how the old Æschylus
"Gathered up life's embers, laid thereto the fires of slow experience."
or how one
"Beheld like a blossom
Dawn lying rosy and soft rocked on the breast of the sea."or gives some such rare description as Hero gives of the life in her tower:
"Music is none for me if no voice of the sea-bird be calling,
Dance there is none but the dance led by the waves on the strand,
High is my chamber and silent, the pathway unknown unto any,
Save to the jewels of air borne on the pinions of flame,
Flitting and stirring with kisses the jars of alyssum and lilies
Bowering my casement and breathing of valleys and rills."One is aware, all through the book, of the delicacy and fineness of womanly touch and intuition, of a feminine expression which is as full of strength as of sweetness, and one cannot read "Antinous", or "Achilles", or "Helena", without recognizing genius. After their publication, she printed, in the leading magazines, a sufficient number to make a second volume, but in her carelessness of what is called fame, they remained uncollected till 1895, when she published "The Singing Shepherd." The initial poem in this volume is one of exquisite beauty and tender feeling, and very many of the others have a personal application, reflecting her moods, her joys, her sorrows. What is there lovelier than these stanzas from "A Green Nook."
"The light slips down from other skies
And mingles with the blue of this,
I hear another music through
The sparrow's bliss."The light of an unfading love
Paints the gay grass and frames the sky,
And hides the moon in mornings seas
And cannot die."It is as if with all her subtle melody and great intention and swift penetration to the inmost meaning of words, she sang for the sweet sake of singing. Yet her work was the work of an artist; and the scope of her effort was wide -- she infused humanity and to-day into the thoughts and fancies of a dead world, and made old legends live with new life in an atmosphere as high as joy, as deep as sorrow. The sweet seriousness, the gracious earnestness of her verse, were never felt so well as when in some seldom moment she read to you, in a voice like the voice of the dove her Demeter sang about, or like the double flute, you think, that one of her own Greek girls might be breathing through. Her imaginative sympathy is delightfully seen in such verses as "On a Wharf", when she pictures various great sailings, her strong religious spirit in "The Comforter", and perhaps her personality is best seen in the verses, "On Waking from a Dreamless Sleep":
"I waked; the sun was in the sky.
The face of heaven was fair;
The silence all about me lay
Of morning in the air."I said, Where hast thou been, my soul,
Since the moon set in the west?
I know not where thy feet have trod,
Nor what has been they quest."Where wast thou when Orion passed
Below the dark-blue sea?
His glittering, silent stars are gone, --
Didst follow them for me?
"Where wast thou in that awful hour
When first the night-wind heard
The faint breath of the coming dawn
And fled before the word?"Where hast thou been, my spirit,
since the long wave on the shore
Tenderly rocked my soul to sleep
And I heard thee no more?"My limbs like breathing marble
Have lain in the warm down;
No heavenly chant, no earthly care,
Have stirred a smile or frown."I wake; thy kiss is on my lips;
Thou art my day, my sun!
But where, O spirit, where wast thou
While the sands of night have run?"In the year 1900 Mrs. Fields published "Orpheus, A Masque", a new interpretation of the old myth. It is a great and wonderful dramatic poem. Her own life work among the poor and suffering suggested of course the motive of the Masque, but it is so surrounded by beauty and music and grace that it reaches the ideal, and the reader feels as in certain of its lines,
"I, a listener, hang
Like a suspended sense 'twixt earth and heaven."Mention of her work would be incomplete if it did not include reference to her notes on the life and friendships of Whittier, in which she makes the old poet, who so admired and loved her, stand before us in his own person, together with her memoirs of Mrs. Stowe, of Charles Dudley Warner, her "Authors and Friends" and her "Shelf of Books."
After her husband's death, Mrs. Fields continued to live in the house that they bought, out of hand, when strolling one Sunday afternoon in search of a suitable home. They climbed over heaps of building material and saw what the place afforded; and they made it something rarely individual. I remember now the impression I received when I first went there -- how many, many years ago. Entering the house you came into a reception room with dark blue velvet furnishings and gray rug, filled with flowers, every part of the walls hung with choice paintings; beyond you caught a glimpse of the dining room, whose windows, latticed with ivy, looked on a long, shady garden running down to the river. Upstairs the room of rooms, the library, ran the whole length of the house, with side alcoves at either end. It held unusual pictures and busts, but the greater part of the walls were covered with books to the ceiling. The moss-green carpet and draperies gave a subdued coloring, and the windows looked over wide water to distant hills. It was characteristic of Annie Fields that instead of complaining when a block of houses was put up near by, shutting off a part of this superb view, she had pleasure in the thought of the new homes and happiness to be there. It was not that a note of simple and incomparable elegance was struck here; it was the natural tone and harmony of the place dominated by the exquisite spirit of a pure and lofty nature, clear-seeing, here all grace and tact and gentle yielding, here inflexible for the right, and always solicitous for others. I felt myself, in that first visit, in a new world, as if I had stepped inside a home in some enchanted wood and among a rarer race of beings; and although frequently sharing its beautiful hospitality since then, I never quite lost the sensation. Doubtless there were other homes as interesting, as enviable; but with a difference. The difference was Annie Fields.
Before his death, Mr. Fields suggested Sarah Orne Jewett as a possible friend and companion for his wife in the future; and she gave Mrs. Fields great happiness, spending with her as much time as she could spare from her own delightful home in South Berwick, and adding her own peculiar charm to the house. Because she had lost the best of life, Mrs. Fields did not give up life itself. After a time the days passed with her as before, except for the great vacancy. The choicest of those at home, the choicest of those that cross the water, poet, painter, and player, came to find welcome, encouragement to budding power, greeting to acknowledged achievement; and the house was one of the pleasantest spots on earth. Now and then Mrs. Fields and Miss Jewett went abroad for a summer's stay, as when they explored the woods of Barbizon, and visited Tennyson. At another time they saw the "glory that was Greece." But more usually in the summer they were to be found in the seaside house, built by Mr. Fields, on thunderbolt hill at Manchester-by-the-Sea, -- which he used to be pleased to say was built with the proceeds of his lectures, -- where the steep avenue leads up to a wonderful outlook of beauty set in the midst of flaming flowers, three sides overlooking the wide shield of the sea, but the fourth side so precipitous that the broad piazza there is only a turret chamber above the tops of the deep woods and orchards below, with the birds flying under it, and looking far over winding river, ripening meadow, and stretching sea again.
There at night one by one the lights of the great Bay twinkle out in the pearly twilight, fluttering, yet fixed, as if strange, bright-winged things were impaled on the stone pillars. The summer sea, the soft dark, the cool and salty breath, were all a part of the peace that surrounded her, in that ideal home of an ideal woman. Although a great grief came into it in the death of Sarah Jewett, yet seldom has there been a sweeter or serener old age than hers. Sufficiently affluent, in the receipt of honor, with friends going and coming, every morning the motor-car of her generous sister Louisa at her disposal, every evening music or books, with the encouraging example of her brilliant sister Sarah's ninety years, the days were full of cheer, and still of good works. And when the last great friend arrived, it was to find her simply fading away as a star fades in morning light.
[ Contents ]
THE secret of Sarah Orne Jewett's great success in her work, outside of its artistic perfection, is the spirit of loving kindness and tender mercy that pervades it. And that is because the same spirit also pervaded herself. She loved her kind, and had the warmest interest in the actions and thoughts and feelings of those about her.
The circumstances of her life fostered this love. The child of a country doctor (than whom no one stands in closer relation to the countryside), she early went about with him on his long drives, and was admitted to an intimacy with the lives of people hardly otherwise attainable, an intimacy revealed on every page of her stories. Something of the character of this wise and kind father, who never lost a chance of teaching her how to observe, and whose name, -- Theodore Herman Jewett, -- has a descriptive charm, she has painted in her story of "The Country Doctor." But elsewhere she says: "My father had inherited from his father an amazing knowledge of human nature, and from his mother's French ancestry that peculiarly French trait called gaietéde cœur. Through all the heavy responsibilities and anxieties of his busy professional life, this kept him young at heart and cheerful. His visits to his patients were often made delightful and refreshing to them by his kind heart and the charm of his personality. I knew many of the patients whom he used to visit on lonely inland farms or on the sea-coast in York and Wells. I used to follow him about silently, like an undemanding little dog, content to follow at his heels. I had no consciousness of watching or listening, or indeed of any special interest in the country interiors. In fact, when the time came that my own world of imagination was more real to me than any other, I was sometimes perplexed at my father's directing my attention to certain points of interest in the character or surroundings of our acquaintances. I cannot help believing that he recognized, long before I did myself, in what direction the current of purpose in my life was setting. Now, as I write my sketches of country life, I remember again and again the wise things he said, and the sights he made me see. He was impatient only with affectation and insincerity."
He could never have been impatient with Sarah, then; for absolute simplicity and sincerity were among her chief characteristics.
Her delicate health, as a child, obliged her to be much outdoors; and in the old town at the head of tidewater, in the Agamenticus region, she had every facility for acquiring a knowledge of nature and of people; here she attended the academy, and found it easy to write verse and hard to write prose; and here she heard the graphic dialect of the country store and of the wharf, ran with the other children to mount the logging team from the woods and ride into town over the creaking snow, and met at her grandfather's the weather-bronzed ship-masters, who brought, to the children's great satisfaction, store of oranges and pineapples and filberts, and big jars of olives and tamarinds, and brought something better yet for hungry imaginations in their stories of the islands of the sea, of the "great storms on the Atlantic and winds that blew them north-about." The place was full of tradition; here she listened to many a strange recital regarding the privateers of the War of 1812, whose crews were shipped all alongshore; regarding the Revolution, in which her mother's people, the Gilmans of Exeter, took the rebels' part, though her father's ancestors could not forsake allegiance to the dear mother country; and regarding the yet older and sadder days of the French and Indian wars. And here, hardly more than a child, she was a writer for the Young Folks and The Riverside; and at nineteen sent her first sketch to the Atlantic Monthly, where her genius was at once recognized and encouraged. She published many volumes after that, and her work was translated into a foreign tongue, but nowhere is it loved so much as at home, where we have the same somewhat tender feeling for its faithfulness and finish, its humor and pathos, that we have for our family portraits.
Surely no one ever had a finer training for work than she had in this ancient town of South Berwick, called by its old people Barvick, after the Norse fashion, where she was born in a colonial house built a hundred and fifty years before and untouched by modern hands. The old hip-roofed mansion, whose paneled hall with its wide arch and ample staircase and huge door opening into greenery of lofty trees beyond, gives one the very picture of hospitable welcome, was always her home, and she had the heartiest affection for it. "I was born here," she said once, "and I hope to die here, leaving the lilac bushes still green and growing, and all the chairs in their places."
There hangs in the old house a little black and white silhouette of one of these French grandmothers of Sarah's, of which a silhouette of Sarah herself, made by Mrs. Whitman, with the lovely, innocent forehead, the delicately arched eyebrow, the finely chiseled nose, the curl of the upper lip, the exquisite corners of the mouth, the oval of the cheek, is a perfect replica even to the turning of an eyelash.
Although she spent a good part of her time here, she was very often the favored sharer of Annie Fields's home, in the historic house on Charles Street in Boston, or where the eagle's eyrie of Thunderbolt Hill has been transformed into a place of flowers in Manchester-by-the-Sea. She traveled much in America, and made several visits abroad; but she always said she had taken no greater delight in these journeyings than in the rides and tramps within the borders of old Berwick. I like to think of her the guest of Tennyson, as he takes in his hands the crystal sphere she wears on her watch-chain, and surveys the stately grace and dark beauty of the American girl -- as if we had sent her to the poet as our best and finest. I like even better to think of her in the old forest of Barbizon, the haunt of Millet, between whose work and her own a subtle resemblance lies, and where the French blood in her veins gave her a certain right of place. Perhaps it is this foreign strain which lent such an attraction to her manner, a manner that combined a height of delicate refinement and cordial artlessness which both fired your fancy and warmed your heart. When you saw her lofty carriage, her dark eyes, her high-bred and beautiful features, you remembered the royal significance of her name in Scripture, and you were half inclined to wonder how it was that a princess of the old rgime was writing stories that were the accurate transcript of the lives of farming and sea-faring folk. But when, if by rare fortune, you heard her read from her own pages, with a voice like a soft south wind, and with a quaint and lovely air that was all her own, then you knew that these stories of hers were written from the heart that beat for humbler, homelier people as if with the same blood.
She was always frankly pleased with the praise her work received, and with every success she had. When one of her books had been translated into another language, she writes to the Aldriches, "She sent me a volume of S. O. J. all in French, which caused such pride of heart that no further remarks are ventured on the subject." She was always ready to give praise to others. I remember once having sent to my agent what I considered a very poor story, to be sold into obscurity, how woefully ashamed I was when I saw it one morning spread out and illustrated in the Sunday paper, where every one might read it, feeling that it was ignoble to have written it at all. And then there came by messenger a note from Sarah giving the story the most magical interpretation. She was full of a sweet and surprising magnanimity and gratefulness.
In writing of the day on which she received the gratifying degree from Bowdoin College, she said of her sister, "Mary was dear and lovely; and the great day was hers as much as mine." And one day, writing to Mrs. Fields, through whom many of her friendships and enjoyments were formed, she said, "None of the great gifts I have received out of loving and being with you seems to me as great as having seen Tennyson." Her characterization of Tennyson, by the way, was almost as fine and wonderful as the man himself:
She was immensely interested in people, and people loved her for it. Wherever she went she made friends, -- some of them her own age, with delightful contemporaneous intimacy, and others much older but made to feel young in her companionship. "It has been one of the best things in life," she wrote once, "to take up some of the old friendships that my mother had to let fall; there is a double sweetness in doing this; one feels so much of the pleasure of those who seem to see something of their lost companionship return." People in the humble ways of life, artists and poets, great novelists, and those of lesser note were her friends and lovers: abroad, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Mrs. Meynell, Freeman, the historian, Madame Blanc-Bentzon, Vernon Lee, Mr. Bryce, the Arnolds, Henry James, and many others; and at home the list included Mr. Lowell, Mr. Longfellow, Mrs. Bell, Anne Whitney, Mr. Aldrich, Mrs. Whitman, Doctor Holmes, Celia Thaxter, Mr. Norton, Katharine Wormeley, Mr. S. S. McClure, Miss Cather, Mr. Bliss Perry, and many others of especial interest. There must have been an inherent excellence in this young girl from a country town to have made her so choice a person in such eyes.
Dearly as she loved people, she also loved and knew all the ways of wood and fell and stream. Once, after a rather sleepless night, she writes to her friend, "I had one most beautiful time which was after your own heart. It began to be light, and after spending some time half out of the window hearing one bird tune up after another, I half dressed myself and went out and stayed until it was bright daylight. I went up the street and out into the garden, where I had a beautiful time, and was neighborly with the hop-toads and with a joyful robin who was sitting on a corner of the barn, and I became very intimate with a big poppy which had made every arrangement to bloom as soon as the sun came up. There was a bright little waning moon over the hill, where I had a great mind to go, but there seemed to be difficulties, as I might be missed, or somebody might break into the house where I had broken out."
No one ever enjoyed the loveliness of things in France more than she did. "The air was about as sweet as it could be, with that dry, strange, sweet old scent that tries to make you remember things that happened long before you were born. And we went walking on, and presently we came to great gates, and still walked on with innocent hearts and a love of pleasure, and we crossed a moat full of flowers and green bushes, and the other side of the old bridge, beyond two slender marble columns with exquisite capitals, was another gateway and a courtyard and an old château asleep in the sun. All the great windows and the hall door at the top of the steps were open, and round the three sides and up to the top of the tower green vines had grown, with room enough to keep themselves separate, and one of them near by was full of bees, and you could hear no other sound. It was La Belle au Bois dormante. You just kept as still as you could, and looked a little while and came away again. And the stone of the chateau was reddish, and the green was green, and the sunshine was of that afternoon softness that made the whole sight of the old house flicker and smile back at you as if you were trying hard to look at something in a dream." Isn't that exquisite?
Her love of the beautiful was fully satisfied in Greece.
"When I think what you would say, and feel, at the sight of this spring landscape and the wintry sky, of such astonishing blue, with its blinding light, like one of our winter mornings after a snowstorm, and the colors of the mountain ranges and the sea, dazzling, and rimmed by far-off islands and mountains to the south; as one looks from the Acropolis and all the spring fields below, and the old columns and the little, near-by flowers, poppies and daisies -- oh, when I see all this and think that you can't see it, too! And then, when I remember what my feelings have been toward the Orpheus and Eurydice and the Bacchic Dance, and then see these wonderful marbles here, row upon row, it is quite too much for a plain heart to bear."
But then again she saw as much beauty at home, even although of a different sort. Of a Watteau fête she writes: "At the close, when shepherd and nymph strayed away down the field to the sea, and Eros strayed after, and the sheep and lamb after him, it made a live little procession that came right from a page of Theocritus!" Writing of some pine-trees, she says, "Oh, do go next summer to see the most superb creatures that ever grew…standing so tall that their great green tops seem to belong to the next world." To-day she discovers a delightful glen, of which she says, "I never have seen a more exquisite spot," and at a later season, "I shall remember as long as I remember anything a small seedling apple-tree that stood by a wall in a high wild pasture at the White Hills, -- standing proudly over its first small crop of yellow apples all fallen into a little almost hollow of the soft turf below."
And then, with eye and heart for another sort of beauty, she writes, "I need not tell you what a joyful homecoming it was. Mother's look as she came running out to meet Mary was something that I never shall forget. It was like some old painter's picture of a Bible scene! With her arms out, and her aging face and figure."
And with all this Sarah Jewett loved books as well; she was an untiring reader of both serious books, and of lighter ones, -- fiction, essays, biographies, poetry. Of Miss Thackeray she says, "One flies to Miss Thackeray's stories at certain turns of Fate, for a world full of shadows, and written out of deep and touching experience, but with beauty and consolation never forgotten or curtained away. Don't you remember Fitzgerald's saying somewhere that he thirsts for the delightful?" And of Thackeray himself she writes, "Thackeray is so great, a great Christian. He does not affect, he humbly learns and reverently tries to teach out of his own experiences."
Sarah's intimacy with the deeper things of life, and her understanding of small troubles, was something wonderful. She had a real sympathy with Miss Austen. "Dear me," she explains, "how like her people are to the people we knew years ago! It is just as much New England before the war -- that is, in provincial towns -- as it ever was Old England. I am going to read another, 'Persuasion' tasted so good."
She was so in earnest in her own work and ultimate purposes that she never hesitated to talk about her stories. "A story which has been lagging a good while is beginning to write itself. Its name is 'A Player Queen', and it hopes to be liked," she says in one of her letters. Of "The Tory Lover" she says, "I grow very melancholy if I fall to thinking of the distance between my poor story and the first dreams of it." She recognized a certain sympathy between herself and what Stepniak said of Turgenieff: "There was in him such a love of light, sunshine, and living human poetry, such an organic aversion to all that is ugly or coarse, or discordant, that he made himself almost exclusively the poet of the gentler side of human nature"; which is certainly very descriptive of Sarah, herself.
It is of stories in general, as well as of her own, that she said what many a writer has thought before: "Good heavens! what a wonderful kind of chemistry it is that evolves all the details of a story and writes them presently in one flash of time! For two weeks I have been noticing a certain string of things, and having hints of character, etc., and day before yesterday the plan of the story comes into my mind, and in half an hour I have put all the little words and ways into their places and can read it off to myself like print. Who does it? for I grow more and more sure that I don't!"
The letters, which Mrs. Fields so tenderly arranged, are really an autobiography, and are written in a way as natural as the way she talked. They are full of lovely passages, full of gentle humor and witty turns, as when she says, "I have so much to tell that my pen splutters," or when the two boys went to the Fair "with smiles on their faces that seemed to tie behind and be quite visible as they walked away."
Any one is mistaken who thinks Sarah Orne Jewett's stories are merely narratives told as she happened to think. They are works where the composition is like that of a fine painting, full of balance of light and shade, of consummate art. Although their truthfulness is similar to that of Jane Austen's work, yet they are of finer, sweeter fiber, and will be read as long as our language lasts. What writer would not rejoice in the authorship of that great story, "The Town Poor", of the beautiful, the wholesome, strong, and altogether noble "Country of the Pointed Firs", and of the incomparable delicacy, the charm, the tender pathos of that lovely and inimitable "A Dunnet Shepherdess"!
Death came to our friend far too soon. She was thrown from a carriage, and a long illness resulted from the injury she received. She made a brave effort, but it was in vain.
Although she had the usual griefs that come to all of us in the loss of beloved relatives and friends, yet in other respects, and except for occasional slight illnesses, Sarah Jewett had a delightful life, and made it delightful to all about her. And a great factor in that life was her own nature, her genuineness, her innocence, her friendliness, her intimate sweetness, her common sense, her nobility, her sympathy. An old friend once said to her, "I want you to thank your mother for bringing you into the world." And I think all who knew her, all who read her writing, feel the same way.
A part of Sarah's work, known to but few of her closer friends, is her verse. She apparently thought it of too little dignity to be mentioned. She was greatly mistaken. It is difficult to speak of it to those unacquainted with it without seeming to say too much.
THE GLOUCESTER MOTHER
When Autumn winds are high
They wake and trouble me,
With thoughts of people lost
A-coming on the coast,
And all the ships at sea.How dark, how dark and cold,
And fearful in the waves,
Are tired folk who lie not still
And quiet in their graves; --
In moving waters deep,
That will not let men sleep
As they may sleep on any hill;
May sleep ashore till time is old,
And all the earth is frosty cold. -
Under the flowers a thousand springs
They sleep and dream of many things.God bless them all who die at sea!
If they must sleep in restless waves,
God make them dream they are ashore,
With grass above their graves.
SARAH ORNE JEWETTWhether it takes shape because when walking in Copp's Hill Burying Ground she sees a little stone to "Miss Polly Townsend, aged nine", or when thinking of the restless graves of the drowned fishermen, or of any other simple human theme, her heart goes out in these verses, and they are not only beautiful and tuneful, but infinitely touching with sweet and tender pitifulness. It is to be hoped that they will yet be collected in a most welcome volume to be treasured by her lovers.
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A TINY woman, wonderfully radiant -- with perfect features, with a delicately lovely skin, illumined by flashing dark eye and loose curling silver hair -- as you looked at her, you wondered how those little hands modeled and disposed the great masses of sculpture, you wondered at the immensity of the work they have given to the world, or you would have done so if it were not for the royal bearing and the glance glowing with fire from heaven.
Born of wise and strong parents, who lived to great age, one of them rounding a century, Anne Whitney always had perfect health, and she never knew failure or any other discouragement than the artistic dissatisfaction which genius is apt to feel regarding work that has not reached the standard which is so high that genius alone sees it.
Her gaze was trained high from the first. She was the disciple and darling of those who conjure with great names in her early youth, at the time when Frederika Bremer mentions her charm; the friend of Emerson and Parker and Phillips and Sumner and the rest, and she lived on the plane of such altitudes ever after. Her moral sense went hand in hand with her other powers, dominating them and leading her always, early and late, into the espousal of the large reforms.
She was still quite young when her poems were handed about from one to another as things of wonder, before there was any center of distribution like the magazines of to-day; then they emblazoned the pages of the Atlantic Monthly with beauty, and when she at last published a small book of them, those who loved great verse felt that here was a poet of the antique mold, one whose verse was strong-winged, and eagle-eyed, glorious with height and depth of flight, with luster and interchanging music. I know of few verses more great or beautiful in the language than the "Sonnets to Beauty", and those again to "Night", than "Camille", the "Hymn to the Sea", the "Last Dream." They are the sublimation of song, and you feel when you read them that it is impossible for poetry to go farther. The first edition, published during the stress of the Civil War, when the hearts and souls of people were torn and anguished, never, through the force of circumstances, received the attention it deserved. The edition, however, was early exhausted, and although those who had report of them tried to obtain them, copies were not to be had.
Many years later, a second edition was published, with some additions, some omissions and emendations.
There is no more unfailing test of poetry than is given by reading it again after a lapse of years; since what filled the cup with precious ichor at one time may, when another age and time rule, seem destitute of sparkle or flavor. But this verse met that test successfully, for the very wine of life is poured on every page. Those who loved the book in the beginning, keeping it beside them, did not, of course, have to use the test; for they took it up frequently, turning the leaves as they do those of Milton and Wordsworth, of Shelley and Keats and Byron, of Emerson, Tennyson, and Browning. For the verse there is a part of that wide wave which swept over the world with the work of those poets. It meets comparison with theirs, is of the great moods and moments, of lofty flight and far reach, full of perennial freshness, and saturated with beauty. At the same time the poems are various, these of a severe simplicity, those of an intimate reserve, and others of dramatic force and fire, and the more recent ones showed surprisingly the strength of the original impulse. The great poems of the book are imperishable creations, with immortal strains in every one, satisfying with their loveliness and completeness, and with their great music. One meets on every page of the book phrases, single lines, stanzas, that startle with their sonorous strength, their sweetness, their penetration and suggestion, their truth and beauty.
Neither Byron's "Apostrophe to the Ocean", nor Swinburne's "I will go down to the great Sea Mother", exceed, if they equal, the "Hymn to the Sea", with its lofty lines, its rippling song, its deeps of thought. Few men have written such poetry as this, nor has any woman except Anne Whitney. Women have indeed written great and beautiful poetry; but it seems to me that this is greater and more beautiful than all. There is no affectation in it, no forced note; it is spontaneous as it is strong. Where shall we find more large expression, more subtle sense of beauty, more well-ordered art, than in this:
"When morning, loosing from its crimson drifts,
Some panting skylark overtakes, most tender
Of such weak rivalships, and prone to render
Homage unto great-heartedness, it lifts
The breaking strain, and all along its lines
Of thrilling light, its currents of pure air
And rosy mists, winds it at will,
Unites and separates, and still
Wreathes it and builds anew beyond despair,
Till light is song, song light -- through all
heaven's steadfast signs."
Or, again, take this picture of tranquil midnight:
"There curved the mountain line away;
And there, the murmuring lapse of blue
Let in between green silences,
To ripple the level smoothness through:
And 'mid soft light and dew
Temur's hushed palace rose into the skies."What life in every peaceful thing!
What trance of living, joyful might!
The heavens may breathe it unto men,
And bulbuls by the charmed light
Sing it to sacred night,
But who may utter it again?"
Of a different quality is the proud assurance in the lines:
"Dear then to her and to the silent Powers,
And borne on their strong wings above defeat
And fear of mockery, all they who build
In stern emprise a shrine for the Unseen;
Making life poor to show how rich it is.Round them heaven's flaming currents stoop and play,
And lap the stifling vapors of the world,
Till the space freshens into festal depths;
And Soul, before a royal mendicant,Pensioned of flesh along the dusky way,
Goes forth with bounty to exultant crowds,
With pulse of music ordering the winds,
And trumpets blowing the eternal morn."
Something of the same sort is expressed in another poem:
"Who meet
Half-way the coming fate and fling
Their hoarded treasures at her feet,
Shall feel through all her clamoring
Her hard eye quail; she knows 'twere vain
To empty what heaven brims again."
Nothing that one can say is adequate to do justice to the scope and dignity and splendor, to the quick sensibility and melting charm of her verse:
"Darkness surrounds me with its phantom hosts,
Till silence is enchanted speech. I feel
Those half-spent airs that through the laurel reel,
And night's loud heart-beats in the tropic coasts --
And soaring amid everlasting frosts
To super-sensual rest, as it might outweigh
A whole worlds strife, o'er me gaunt Himaleh
Droops his broad wing of calm. Those peaks, like ghosts
Outstaring Time, through darkness glimmering!
No rush of pinion there, nor bubbling low --
But death, and silence past imagining; --
Only, day in and out, with endless swing,
Their aged shadows move, and picture slow
One on another's unrelenting snow."
It was thought at first that of course poetry was to be Anne's natural expression. But she had always had facility with her pencil, and one day in a conservatory, falling in with an overturned pot of clay, she stooped to trace out a fancy, beginning carelessly, to end seriously, coming back to it next day full of ardor. "I have done it, Sarah," she called to her sister, "and I always knew I could!"
From that time she gave herself up to sculpture, obliged to work without aid or instruction, for there was nothing of the sort then in this country, and there were but one or two sculptors. Except for some extended anatomical studies with Dr. Rimmer and the friendly comment of the only sculptor she knew, genius was her only teacher.
A statue of Godiva, unclasping the "wedded eagles of her belt", full of purity and purpose, was her first considerable work; and it was followed by one called "Africa", a recumbent figure of the African type, just awaking from sleep, wondering, bewildered, and throwing off the wild beast's skin that has enwrapped her. The colossal size of the subject has a tropical and continental significance; the sleeper wakes to the measured step, the swelling music of the march of the ages; she shades her eyes from the blinding light of the new revelation -- when you saw it you could think only of Michelangelo. "And Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God", was the legend around the plinth. She had it broken up after a while, however.
In full contrast with this was her "Lotus Eater", a youth's figure, beautiful in excess of languor, and bearing all the blissful burden of Tennyson's poem and of the Homeric legend.
Then there was a beautiful bas-relief of Chaucer, a group of spirited horses' heads, and various portrait busts.
These were followed by a statue of Toussaint L'Ouverture, black but mighty, nude in his chill dungeon. Betrayed, forsaken, destroyed, but unshaken, heroic to his last fiber, he has written on the floor, Dieu se charge, and while he looks at you with sadness not to be spoken in his eyes, his whole mien declares his knowledge of the eternal justice which shall right the wrong at last.
Shortly after this Miss Whitney went abroad, with Adeline Manning, -- herself an artist of high ideals, the friend whose life was a part of her own, -- spending five years in profound study of ancient sculpture, most of the time in Rome, but some of it in Paris, Florence, and Munich.
One of the results of her work abroad was the statue of the "Chaldean Astronomer", reverent, intent, searching the great mystery of the stars, with the shining of their eternal secret in his countenance.
But a still finer work was the superb "Roma", a magnificent old woman, clad in the tattered robes of her greatness, sitting on the capital of an overturned Corinthian column, the mother of many nations, the maker of laws, the exacter of tribute from the ends of the earth, wearing now the badge of the licensed beggar, holding a penny between her fingers, old patrician fingers, and dreaming what dreams of past conquest, of dulled song, of lost splendor and power! The face is as strong, as mystic as the Sibyl's, the whole proud wretchedness is heartrending, and the beauty is absolute. The statue had such an effect that various of her American friends thought it not safe to have certain Italians aware of it.
When the sculptor returned to America, it was with the technique of her art complete, and fired and inspired by the great masterpieces that had been the companions of her last five years. She executed then several fine portrait-busts of the presidents of Harvard and Amherst colleges, of Mr. Garrison, of the poet Keats. A replica of the latter was later made by her to be set up in the Parish Church of Hampstead, England, as a memorial to him whose name was writ in water.
Going to Europe a second time, she completed for the State of Massachusetts the statue of Sam Adams, a marble copy of which is in the pantheon of our national gods in Washington, while the original, in bronze, in one of the busiest of the Boston squares, arrests the eye by its strength and simplicity, and by its controlled energy and fire.
Anne Whitney did not make her great triumphs without arousing envy and jealousy, and becoming the victim of intrigue. When the designs for a sitting statue of Charles Sumner were sent in, it was a matter of public report that the award was given to hers till it was discovered that it was by a woman. She had never competed before, and she never did so again. The statue was, a long time afterward, erected in the grounds of Harvard University.
A statue of Harriet Martineau, in marble, larger than life, an impressive image of intellectual calm, given to Wellesley College, was singularly beautiful, and might have sat for a type of womanhood itself; it was uncovered in the Old South Church, with speeches by Wendell Phillips and others, and seemed to mark an epoch in the work of women in this country. It was destroyed when the building that contained it was burned.
Her next work was the statue of Leif Ericsson, in bronze, whose erection was the occasion of a celebration by the Scandinavians in New England, and an address in Fanueil Hall. The voyager is a sailor of rough waves; he stands firmly on the prow of his ship, and shielding his eyes from the sun, looks out over the mighty land he has found. Beardless and bold, he is the very incarnation of the spirit of youth and adventure and boundless hope. All this is great and splendid work, but it is not the half. There was a charming fountain full of light airiness and grace, a child frolicking among huge calla lily leaves, sent to the Columbian Exposition, together with "Roma", enlarged to the heroic, a copy of Leif Ericsson, and portrait-busts of Frances Willard, Mrs. Stowe, and Lucy Stone, accurate in likeness and wonderful in art, each of them the living woman, but so transfigured that her soul shone through the stone.
Some of this great artist's loveliest work is in depicting children and groups of children. During her second stay in Europe she did some delightful things of the sort, as well as the head of an old woman of ideal ugliness, a model once of the French artists, whom she drove to despair by always falling asleep while they worked. Miss Whitney seized the moment like an inspiration and modeled her asleep in a triumph of realism.
At about the same time she did the "Faun of Fontainebleu," the head of a little peasant child, the most woodsy, tricksy, humorsome, laughing thing alive, it seems. The modeling is exquisite, full of lines of antique grace; the broad mouth and flat nose are molded into beauty, the flesh is real, the glance is of infinite mirth, and there is just the one little trace of melancholy in the midst of the mirth, regret that she is not human. When the French artists saw these things, they laughed at the idea of her wishing to learn of them. A copy of this little treasure I own as her gift, as well as the beautiful bust of Adeline Manning.
After the death of her mother, who lived for over a hundred years, Miss Whitney, with her sister and her friend, left the house in Watertown, although often having occasion to visit the studio that her brother built for her there, -- her brother who believed in her genius and aided its development by all the means in his power, -- and took a spacious house on Mt. Vernon Street in Boston. This overflowed with books and music and flowers and rare and beautiful objects of art, a house of generous hospitality and unbounded benignity, in which the guest found every room the Chamber of Peace. In her large studio, on the top floor, overlooking old Boston, she was often good enough to admit her friends, and they could watch her work, or wander round among the masques and reliefs, the model of Garrison in his chair, of the young hero Shaw riding into death, of Shakespeare dreaming against the garden-wall in the sun, the last a thing beautiful beyond belief. The wall has various symbols and figures scrawled upon it from the "Midsummer Night's Dream", visible expressions of the poet's thought, and the smile on Shakespeare's face as the antics of his forest crew occur to him, is ineffable. She was never quite satisfied with this, and it remained unfinished. She gave it as it was to Olive Dargan, who in the last years of her life was her comfort and joy.
But Anne Whitney loved great space and light, and one day the altar-gods were moved to the Charlesgate, and a double apartment on the top floor, with a studio over it, gave them shelter. There she overlooked all the shine and glory of the river Charles, a great sky and a landscape reaching to distant hills. The large rooms were filled with rare and beautiful things, and they held such an atmosphere of peace and delight that it was like receiving a benediction to enter them. She entertained generously there, and one was always sure of meeting delightful people; genius was not more welcome than goodness. Not the least of the delightful ones was her sister Sarah, a little lady, crippled with rheumatism, who lived in a sort of holy peace, and was not any lower than the angels. Her death was simply going home.
Indeed, the various phases of what we call goodness, among which is concern in public welfare, interested Anne in her later life as warmly as art did, perhaps more. She was an active abolitionist from her youth, a suffragist from the beginning, a worker in the cause of womankind; and in the last ten years of her life, although not accepting socialism altogether, she was yet largely prejudiced in its favor. Adeline Manning, her other self and second conscience, gentle as a moonbeam, yet firm as a rock, upheld her in all this. It was pleasanter to them to spend their money in printing and distributing pamphlets concerning the causes they wished to advance for the healing of the nations, than to have opera tickets for a season. When once I had persuaded them to hear the Götterdämmerung, they looked at me with reproachful eyes as if I had urged them to commit a sin. None the less they heard a great deal of the best music, and saw all the great players, and heard the best speakers; but it was on occasion, and often the singers and artists came to them. But there was nothing of the ascetic about them; they enjoyed life, lived comfortably, and dressed richly, yet somewhat after a fashion of their own. Miss Whitney's distinction showed through every movement. When she lay asleep in her last illness, she looked like the recumbent statue of some goddess. In fact, nobility was the type of her beauty and of her being. She was of a large and open-handed generosity. When, after her brother's death, she lost a good part of her income through the misbehavior of his agent, her regret was much more because she could not give the large sums she had been in the habit of giving than for any loss of her own. One never came into her presence without feeling a certain sense of exaltation. There was no air of superiority, no assumption of genius; it was as if one breathed with her in a finer, purer atmosphere.
The unexpected death of Adeline after a brief illness was a terrible shock and sorrow to Anne, and she was long in recovering her poise. For a few summers she did not go to her farm in Shelburne, where she managed many acres of rich intervale land beside the swift Androscoggin, so remote and hushed that when the train throbbed up at night through the echoing hills it seemed like a messenger from some outer world. It was the spot that Starr King declared the very choicest of the White Mountains, where the long, outlying ranges suddenly open, and Madison, Washington, and Adams rise in purple majesty and make day royal and night mystical with their vast altars smoking to heaven, and where she seemed to be in her own region. There she raised her crops, had her cows, her garden, her hill-climbing, her hermit thrush, and made such happy excursions as that of one day up the side of Mt. Randolph, where as we sat on the turf, lunching and looking across the deep valley into the dark caves and dells of the forests of Mt. Adams, as if to lift the spell of solemnity and lighten the moment, she repeated the "Brides of Quair."
Instead of renewing the heart-piercing memories of the past in Shelburne, she accepted the hospitality of a cottage on the estate of her cousin, Mr. Charles A. Stone, in Plymouth, where for several seasons she had the great solace of the sea. Before her death, Mr. Stone bought from her the Shelburne estate, and is now planning to make of the house on the Knoll, where with her choicest friends she passed the long summer days, a memorial to her, a beautiful thing to do, and a beneficence to those that will travel to it as to a shrine.
It was an unspeakable blessing that when she was left alone, Olive Dargan, herself a poet whose work has the Shakespearean phrase, came with her grace and strength and sympathy, her sweet and helpful nature, her high-minded habit, interested in the same questions, trying to solve the same problems, finally abiding with her altogether, and making her as happy as anyone can be who has reached ninety years. Not that Anne Whitney ever manifested her age either physically or mentally; at ninety she walked for miles, and she kept abreast of the age; she was young in feeling and in thought, with a sort of immortal youth. "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety."
Yet all the time, while one feels blest in verse or marble, one is aware that Anne Whitney herself was still finer than her work, or than any work. There was grandeur in the directness of her character, in the utter absence of self-assertion, in her love of her kind, in her boundless benevolence of word and deed and interpretation, her belief in good, her constant action in accord with the forces that work for righteousness, in her fearless truth, that was so intense a lie would shrivel before it, in her rapt single-mindedness, in the glow of her genius that penetrated to the inner beauty of all things and transmuted it to the possibilities of common eyes. With all this, a great artist, a great poet, a great woman, and always a beautiful one, something for the whole race to rejoice in, she was as sweet and simple as a child, as lovable, as willful withal, and as imperious.
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APPLEDORE and Haley's, Cedar and Malagar, White and Seavey's, Star and Duck, Shag and Mingo Rocks and Londoners, the Devil's Rock, Anderson's, Square Rock, and the Old Harry, a few acres of trap and granite and a handful of soil, hurling the spray from one to another and breasting the whole force of the Atlantic surge, make up the Isles of Shoals, off the coast of Maine, where Celia Thaxter passed the greater part of her life, a life fed with the wild wonder of sea and sky and transfigured rock, the multitudinous phases of color, and the equally multitudinous phases of emotion.
In all our literature she is the most picturesque figure. A singular charm surrounded her and was a part of her, the charm of shoreless, sea-dewed mornings fresh from God, of winds and weltering waters, of boundless horizons, and a free, wide, lonely sphere that seems to swing in space apart from other spheres, a region where, when one wakes in a summer morning, one fancies the morning made for the first time, she says, the world like a rose new-blown, "with only the caressing music of the water to break the utter silence, unless, perhaps, a song-sparrow pours out its blissful warble like an unbodied joy. The sea is song, and the sky; the line of land is radiant; the scattered sails glow with the delicious color that touches so tenderly the bare, black rocks." Here, in her early childhood, she came, -- with her brothers, her mother, and that mighty man, her father, who, disaffected with men, was to be the keeper of the White Island light. Later they moved to Appledore, where first one and then another came, drawn by rumor of its solitude and charm, -- Levi Thaxter to practice his voice in the great open spaces and to marry the young girl out of hand, then James Russell Lowell, Wentworth Higginson, and others, until at last a great hotel was opened there. On this island Celia spent every summer and many a winter of her life, as much a thing of delight herself as any other that the islands have.
What scenes to fire a poet's fancy did the place afford her! The storms, the calms, filled her with great emotions, the pathetic life of the fishing-people, their loneliness, their dangers, their sorrows, their splendid strength and brown and ruddy tints of weather, their daring youth, their dreary age; the terror of the wrecks, breathless suspenses of the gales; the wistful watching for a sail; the pensive beauty of the fog "clinging in silver strips to the dark, wet sails of vessels lying becalmed, when all the air about was clear and free from mist"; the ghastly horror of such visions as that of the vessel of the castaways, in the glare of the winter sunshine, "still with all sail set, standing upright upon the ledge -- a white column looming far away"; the herring-net drawn in by moonlight, where, as she mentions, every fish hangs like a long silver drop from the close-set meshes, knowing more of it, perhaps, than Allingham did when he half wished
"To hand a pilot's oar and sail,
Or haul the dripping moonlight mesh spangled with herring scale."
Then there were too, day after day, year after year, the common sights of the sea over the boatside, -- strange, beautiful fishes, such as the baby sculpin, "a fairy creature, the color of a blush-rose, striped and freaked and pied with silver and gleaming green, hangingin the almost invisible water as a bird in air, with broad, transparent fins, suffused with a faint pink, stretched inside like wings to upbear the supple form"; or the wondrous phosphorescence where, with her finger, she writes her thought in fire along the dark wet rocks. "There had been much talk and song and laughter," she mentions once, "much playing with the warm waves, (or rather smooth undulation of the sea, for there was not a breath of wind to make a ripple), which broke at a touch into pale-green phosphorescent fire. Beautiful arms, made bare to the shoulder, thrust down into the liquid darkness, shone flaming silver and gold, from the fingers playing beneath fire seemed to stream; emerald sparks clung to the damp draperies, and a splashing oar-blade half revealed sweet faces and bright young eyes. Suddenly a pause came in talk and song and laughter; and in the unaccustomed silence we seemed to be waiting for something. At once out of the darkness came a slow, tremendous sigh that made us shiver in the soft air, as if all the woe and terror of the sea were condensed in that immense and awful breath, and we took our oars and pulled homeward with the weird fires flashing from our bows and oar-blades. 'Only a porpoise blowing,' said the initiated, when we told our tale."
Here too, to the outdoor child, came the spectacle of northern lights casting their films across the stars and flaring out of the winter darkness as nowhere else short of the great arctic circle, "the sky at midnight crimson and emerald and orange and blue in palpitating sheets along the whole northern half of the heavens, or rosy to the zenith, or belted with a bar of solid yellow light from east to west, as if the world were a basket and it the golden handle." All this beauty she has immortalized in her little book "The Isles of Shoals", which has become a classic.
What experiences were hers, moreover, in the appalling gales that have blown the sea in a breach across Appledore, Old Harry tossing the far-off breakers sky-high, and the near waves plunging in a maddened troop of giants, white as milk, sweeping all before them, the spray bursting in flying clouds overhead, and for many days after the sun shone and the sky was blue again the spray still leaping in far-reaching shafts of snow. It was wonderful to wake, she tells us, "on some midsummer morning and find the sea gray-green like translucent chrysoprase, and the somewhat stormy sunrise painting the sails bright flame-color as they flew before the warm wild wind." Lovely hours were hers high in a crevice of the rock on sunny afternoons after storm with a sunlit clash of breakers far below, the vast rainbow shifting and vanishing, the fine salt breath of the brine streaming about her, the great gulls soaring and flashing in fathomless blue.
With these sights and sounds and thoughts by day and night, what should come but song? "Infinite variety of beauty always awaited me," she said, "and filled me with an absorbing, increasing joy, such as makes the song-sparrow sing, -- a sense of perfect bliss…. Ever I longed to speak these things that made life so sweet." And speak she did, -- how sweetly, how magically, with what strength and music!
And if she saw pictures, what pictures she herself made, -- a little child coming to White Island, awed by all the splendor of the sea, delighted by all its unspeakable variety, launching her fleets of mussel shells in the still pools among the rocks, running along the beach under the banner of the broken bough that had drifted ashore, woven in and out with the long, shining ribbon-grass that streamed trembling on the wind, calling the loons about her as she imitated their cries, then laughing to see them come, and chilled to the marrow by their unearthly, answering laugh, or at their long, shuddering cries before a storm. Here she danced after the sandpiper at the edge of the foam, the sandpiper of whom later she sang:
"I watch him as he skims along
Uttering his sweet and mournful cry,
He starts not at my fitful song
Or flash of fluttering drapery.
He has no thought of any wrong,
He scans me with a fearless eye,
Staunch friends are we, well-tried and strong,
The little sandpiper and I."Comrade, where wilt thou be to-night
When the loosed storm breaks furiously?
My driftwood fire will burn so bright!
To what warm shelter canst thou fly?
I do not fear for thee, though wroth
The tempest rushes through the sky,
For are not we God's children both,
Thou, little sandpiper, and I?"Sarah Orne Jewett's pet name for her was Sandpiper.
Here she watched the lighting of the lamps that swing their rays out ruby and gold over the water, or she kindled them herself, "so little a creature as I might do that much for the great world!" she cried. And one windless night in June, when the iron door of the great lantern was open, she was penetrated with the sense of beauty in least things as a Luna moth glided in on its long, swallow-like wings and sailed round the lamps, a greater marvel than Titania. Here she sat with her signal light on moonless nights, in the slip that marked the only landing for her father's boat, feeling "so much a part of the Lord's universe" that she was no more afraid of the dark than the winds and waves are. Now her heart was wrung with pity over the sea-birds dashing themselves to death against the light; now she paled, listening to the awesome legends of the islands, -- the old negress seeking for buried treasure in the lonely moonlight, a weird figure with her dark, eager face, her fluttering gown and her swaying divining-rod, -- or trembled to hear of the drowning Spanish sailors in the winter night, who, tossed ashore by the sea, threw themselves upon a protecting wall, but had not strength left to climb across, and perished in sight of fires and lights and cheer, coated and crusted with the frozen spray of the pursuing waves. What pleasure a lyric of Sarah Orne Jewett's gave Celia as she thought of her childhood on Star Island, and how deeply it touched her heart!
High on the lichened ledges, like
A lonely sea-fowl on its perch,
Blown by the cold sea wind, it stands,
The quaint forsaken Gosport church!No sign is left of all the town,
Except a few forgotten graves,
But to and fro the white sails go
Slowly across the glittering waves.And summer idlers stray about,
With curious questions of the lost
And vanished village, and its men
Whose boats by those same waves were tossed.I wonder if the old church dreams
About its parish, and the days
The fisher-people came to hear
The preaching and the songs of praise.Rough-handed, bronzed by sun and wind,
Heedless of fashion, or of creed,
They listened to the parson's words --
Their pilot heavenward indeed.Their eyes on week-days sought the church,
Their surest land mark, and the guide
That led them home from far at sea
Until they anchored safe besideThe harbor-bar that braved the storm
With its resistless strength of stone --
These busy fishers all are gone,
The church is standing here alone.But still I hear their voices strange,
And still I see the people go
Over the ledges to their homes;
The bent old women's footsteps slow;The faithful parson stop to give
Some timely word to one astray;
The little children hurrying on
Together chattering of their play.I know the blue sea covers some,
And others in the rocky ground
Found narrow lodgings for their bones, --
God grant their rest is sweet and sound!I saw the worn rope idle hang
Beside me in the belfry brown,
I gave the bell a solemn toll
I rang the knell for Gosport town!
Even in those first days she found delight past words in growing things, such as the pimpernel, the primrose, the iris. "I remember in the spring kneeling on the ground to seek the first blades of grass that pricked through the soil, and bringing them into the house to study and wonder over," she says. "Whence came their color? How did they draw their sweet, refreshing tint from the brown earth, or the limpid air, or the white light?" And even then she had a scrap of garden where only marigolds grew, over whose unfolding, a little, half-savage being -- gentle and lovely little savage -- she says she knelt like a fire-worshiper. It was the beginning of a garden, the story of whose glory should be immortal, and of which she told but the truth when writing, "The little spot of earth at the Island is like a mass of jewels. Who shall describe the pansies streaked with burning gold; the dark velvet coreopsis and the nasturtium; the larkspurs, blue and brilliant as lapis lazuli, the ardent marigolds that flame like mimic suns? The sweet peas are of a deep, bright rose-color, and their odor is like rich wine, too sweet almost to be borne except when the pure fragrance of mignonette is added, -- such mignonette as never grows on shore. Why should the poppies blaze in such imperial scarlet? What quality is hidden in this thin soil which so transfigures all the familiar flowers with fresh beauty?" At four o'clock in the morning with her maid she was gathering and arranging the blossoms that should cover table and shelf and desk and make her room a bower. It is the flowers of this garden, as well as the wild flowers of the island, of which she said:
"The barren island dreams in flowers, while blow
The south-winds, drawing haze o'er sea and land,
Yet the great heart of ocean throbbing slow
Makes the frail blossoms vibrate where they stand."
These she perpetuated not only in song, but on panel and vase and plaque, dipping her pencil in the boundless reservoir of color about her, with the grace of the breaking wave in her line; and one feels in reading her prose or her poetry, in looking at her work, that she was but the human expression of the beauty environing her.
Perhaps it is because her life and situation were so picturesque that whenever I think of Celia Thaxter I see her as if in a series of pictures. Now it is a box of sweet peas from her garden that she sends to her friend on shore, the flowers so arranged that as they lie in the box they make one long beam of color, from deep crimson to pale pink and snow white, as if she had in mind some idealization of the long lighthouse ray. Now it is her painting of an olive branch with leaves and berries, that Harry Fenn brings back from the Shoals with satisfaction. Now it is when she gives the long strings of the exquisite and many-colored tiny shells found on Londoners, and pierced and strung by herself, tall and lithe in her blue flannel boating-dress, straight as the oar she holds. Now it is in a scene of her maturer life, when, owing to her mother's illness, she stayed all winter at Appledore, and the household transformed the immense hotel dining room into a living room, facing south and east, and barricaded themselves against the northwest blasts, which had broken windows, rocked chimneys, and blown the fires out into the room.
At the lower end were assembled the range, the milk-pans, the kitchen furnishings, the three Norwegian maids with their long yellow braids; one side of the room held the secretary and desk and books of one of the two sympathetic brothers, and the windows, and most of the other side, were filled with more than a hundred green and flowering plants cared for by the brother whose songs she sometimes published with her own.
There were sofas, tables, screens, and various stoves; and in the upper corner were placed her easel and desk and piano and rugs. The whole life was like that of some medieval great lady in castle-hall; and there, through any of the four glass doors and ten windows, Celia watched moonrise and sunset, storms sweep up, and snows fall, and for a month at a time, hemmed in by ice floes, knew nothing of the outside world, while the family lived sufficient unto themselves.
Again I see her in her garden, a majestic woman clothed in white, telling me that she has forgotten all her many troubles and sorrows in the study of theosophy, and had become a member of the parent society in India. The last time I saw her, it was another picture. We were in a statuary gallery. The long room was thronged with plaster casts and busts, cold white statues and reliefs; and at the farther end of the place, clad all in purple, a flush on her sea-tanned face, she stood with her golden-haired, ruddy-faced son, the very impersonation of life in contrast with those still, dead, white things.
Celia Thaxter was an altogether unique personality. No one else in the world of letters had her strange environment, her wonderful experience. She was a poet in the very depths of her being; she loved beauty intensely, and was satisfied with its abundance about her; she knew the secrets of seas and skies and winds; she was at one with nature, and nature made her a confidante. She was very attractive in appearance, with radiant countenance and brilliant smile; every one was drawn to her by her sympathy, her frankness and freshness. At the front in books and affairs, her intelligence was surpassed only by her kindliness. For many seasons she held court at the Shoals with authors and artists, musicians and friends. She had many troubles, but she also had great joys.
Out of all this rare life, a life impossible otherwhere, what should come but one in youth sea-burned, sun-kissed, as supple, as graceful, as wild and sweet as a sea-nymph should have been, in her maturer life as fine, as free, as broad as a force of nature! Married when hardly more than a child, and taken into the life of the extremest culture there is among us, but always returning to her island, her sea, her flowers, finding the deep new happiness that sang,
"Dear little head that lies in calm content
Within the gracious hollow that God made
In every human shoulder, where he meant
Some tired head for comfort should be laid,"
a wife, a mother, a widow, she knew every side of life, its happiness, its suffering; and she was serene with a strength that belongs only to great natures, rock-rooted although thrilled with every vibration of the world around, and warmed and flushed with the radiance of divine love.
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WHAT a joyous time was that in which I first knew Gail Hamilton! We always called her Gail, for having first known of her by that name, it became difficult to use any other, and she forgave it to us. We were young and very happy, writing with delight in our effort. She had come to see me with Mr. Derby, a publisher, and we had passed a gay afternoon. She came several times afterward; and I saw her again one evening when Jane Andrews and I had been invited to meet her and Mr. Curtis, the author of the "Potiphar Papers"; but, despite that, I did not feel that I had much intimacy with her. There was another time, several years later, when she came to see me and my little son, whose beautiful black eyes were pleased with her bright face.
One day, at about that time, having heard that I was engaged on a work requiring money, a work she would have liked to do herself, had she had the chance, she sent me a note saying so, and out of it fell a hundred-dollar bill. Of course I at once returned the bill with affectionate gratitude, but I think it was a wonderfully kind thing for one young writer to do for another -- and she had not too many hundred-dollar bills at the time. But Gail Hamilton was always doing such things. When she began to receive good payment for her writings, she kept a fund on hand from which she lent money, without interest, to people to whom a little help meant a great deal; but if at the specified time the loan were not returned, she asked for it, quite compellingly, that she might lend it to someone else in need. I remember once that an old parish functionary became so bothered and confused and alarmed about the parish money that should have been in his hands and was not, that she privately gave him the money to make the deficit good, sure that he was only the victim of circumstances. She was generosity itself; she gave not only her money, but her time, her work, herself.
There never was a more complex personality than hers. Her people, pure English stock, had been in Essex County two hundred and sixty years when she was born, and all their diverse characteristics seemed to come to blossom in her. As a child she was overflowing with vitality, full of the joy of life, and of an astonishing intellectual energy. At two years she not only recited verses, but she knew the obligation of a promise. Woods and fields and skies were her companions, and all her life long they gave her the same happiness they did when she first looked up and realized the infinity of the depth of the blue above her.
In those days the Congregational church had much the same authority that it had in the time of the Puritan. It was the center of life and thought and conversation. Whatever the books in her father's house were, none held her attention as did the Bible, with its high inspiration to her faith, its tender promises to her heart, and the appeal of its poetical splendor to her imagination. Its language was her language, and she could neither speak nor write without using it; a rare scholar on many lines, she valued her biblical knowledge more than any other. She was a member of the church at an early age, and she continued in its communion till her death, although she grew widely liberal in her interpretation of its creed. So strong was this biblical influence that even the little garden of her childhood felt it, this corner being Jericho, and that Capernaum, this bank the Mount of Olives, and another Sinai.
She was educated at the school of the great-hearted Mrs. Cowles of Ipswich, where she led her classes, greatly interesting Mr. Cowles, whose physical blindness seemed to enlarge his spiritual sight, and who impressed and influenced the young student to a high degree. She became then a teacher herself, first in Ipswich and afterwards at Hartford, a marvelous teacher, awakening in her pupils powers they did not dream of and new conceptions of life, striking a vital spark from the driest facts of study. She began, while still teaching, to write and publish verses and short, crisp, epigrammatic sketches. The verses were not of much account, but the sketches took the public fancy at once. She had an irresistible desire to write, and signed everything with a pseudonym composed of one syllable of her own name, and the name of her native town, every sod of which she loved.
She left Hartford to teach in the family of Doctor Bailey in Washington. The doctor said they had never had anyone in the house equal to her. There she had her first introduction to the anti-slavery celebrities, with whom she was in full sympathy, and to others of repute, and found herself mingling in affairs. She suffered agonies of shyness at first; she never in all her life could bear to be looked at; this was partly because she felt that her appearance was made unlovely by an accident that had happened to one of her eyes. But the appearance was not unlovely; she had an exquisite complexion, her mouth was red and sweet, her nose was piquant and well-cut, her teeth were fine, her forehead white, and her golden-brown hair was abundant and curled naturally. She was very attractive; and if you had not thought her so at first, you were sure of it when you left her presence and ever afterwards. She had many lovers and various and persistent offers of marriage.
She was an ardent clanswoman; every one in Hamilton had her interest or her fostering care, and a relative of any degree, was dear to her. She loved her immediate family with an intensity that sought in every way to promote their happiness, and in return they adored her. "Greatest woman in America" one of her brothers used to say. When, at the age of twelve, she was sent away to school in Cambridge, she wrote constantly to those at home, knowing how they would miss the light of the house, and she did the same when at Ipswich, in spite of the labor of her studies. Indeed, all her life she wrote long and delightful letters to the various members of her family, never letting her work, her political and social life -- all of which she lived at high pressure -- interfere with the bulletins that made them sharers of her activities, her acquaintances, her pleasures, her triumphs. She reported to them the praises she received, not with any vanity or conceit, for she had neither, but because she knew it would give them more pleasure than it gave her. And perhaps no woman ever received more praise than she did. Very likely she naturally enjoyed it, but it never turned her head in the very least; she regarded herself, if not exactly in the light of a messenger, yet as having been given a certain thing to do; and she did it, whether it was to make happiness for others, to reprove the sinner and afterwards to help and bless him, or to essay the reform of the church.
If she were fearlessly frank, she was also tenderly kind; her spirit was not to be daunted, and her clemency was equal to her courage. Yet I have always felt that in spite of the praise and flattery she did receive, her recognition was insufficient, for her flashing humor so over-lay her genius that except by a few her genius was not fully appreciated.
On Doctor Bailey's death, Gail returned home, -- although visiting Mrs. Bailey at times, -- and there she took up her work with energy, no longer hindered by teaching. She wrote sparkling articles for the Atlantic, the Congregationalist, and other publications, maintaining her pseudonym through what she felt to be a principle, and answering no letters concerning her work addressed to her own name, Mary Abigail Dodge. Mr. Whittier once told her it was better her real name should be known, as it might keep her within the bounds of good behavior. "Thee has great audacity," he said.
She loved people and penetrated their intimate character, as witness her description of Hawthorne, when she met him in Boston, before visiting in his house:
"He is a glorious man, a very ideal man in his personal appearance, with an infinite forehead, his gray, dry, long hair thrown back from it in all directions, deep lamps of eyes glowing from under their heavy arches, black eyebrows and moustache, a florid healthy face, -- a pure, sensitive, reticent, individual man whom it is enough to have seen, to have been in the same house with. He talks little, but he talks extremely well."
Of Doctor Holmes she said: "He is as crisp and clear and incisive in his talk as in his books. He is a man who has an admirable command of all his resources. His sword is two-edged and keen."
Between herself and Mr. Whittier a very tender and beautiful friendship existed. They visited each other, and corresponded, sometimes seriously, but oftener with amusing banter. "I like thee scolding and I like thee smiling, and I hurl defiance at thee. Thee says thee cannot look into Annie Field's face and blame her for anything, but thee makes up for it the moment thee looks in my face," she writes to him; and he writes to her: "I was a little blue this morning, but thy letter was just the tonic I needed. If anybody is out of sorts and hypped, I shall prescribe for him a course of thy letters."
"The trouble with me," she once said, "is that I like everybody." Perhaps that is the reason why she liked flies. "As for flies, I like them. I think a fly is real good company. I spent a good part of one rainy Sunday afternoon watching them. How do you suppose life presents itself to a fly? When they get too numerous for comfort, we just buy a little poison paper, and death comes to them with no dread or fright, only as a fragrant and luring feast -- a sweet intoxication. Oh, I wouldn't give up the flies for anything!" Possibly many of us have had the same feeling at sight of the first little companionable fly on the pane in spring.
But interested as she was in people, -- and flies, -- she cared for inanimate nature and the landscape even more, cared for nature in every form, as much in the great, white, whirling snowstorm as in the spring that she saw underlying the snows. "Spring always seems to open heaven to me," she wrote. "It hints all manner of hidden depths and half-revealed possibilities, and new creations. It is vague and dreamy and eternal. Nothing in the fullness of summer, though I love summer, so speaks of immortality and the highest happiness as the tenderness of the early spring, -- beauty budding from grayness and roughness, just as delicate as the sky."
But then she loved October better still. "How crisp and pungent and aromatic and warm this October is! Its sweetness is as if all the birds and flowers of all the generations of the summers had been distilled into it. The Junes and Julys are of the earth earthy. They have form and color -- they riot and fade, but this October is the spiritual substance of the whole year. It is not form, nor fragrance, nor color, but essence. Past and future meet in one rapturous now, -- a now that fulfills more than hope ever promised, and prophesies more than thought ever dreamed."
She returned to Washington several times for short and long stays, with the Baileys and with the Blaines, and had joyous seasons there; great men and charming women clustered about her, senators, cabinet officers, diplomats, the titled Englishmen of the High Commission, the President himself, all attended on her court, at first entertained and delighted with her brilliancy and pleasantness, and then discovering her as a woman of affairs, having her part in statecraft, and of great value with her advice and her work. Much of this work was in the form of editorials, that had an extraordinary effect. It would be strange to think of this young girl from a secluded hamlet developed into a past master of affairs, not only in politics but in statesmanship, fully informed, deferred to, listened to, sought after for assistance, if it were not that almost every New England girl has an innate instinct for public affairs.
In these days she dressed royally, in white silk and lace, peach-bloom satin, or brocaded cloth of silver, and from her old shyness she had grown to perfect poise and aplomb. She was an ornament to the house of her cousin, Mrs. Blaine, -- a woman of great intellect and wit, who devotedly upheld her husband's hands in every way, not only with complete understanding, but with counsel, with care, and with the entire forgetfulness of self in which she lived the life of her affections.
Gail had another happy period with the Blaine family, all of whom loved her and were as much at her feet as every one else was, when in Augusta, helping Mr. Blaine collect and collate the facts for his book, "Twenty Years in Congress." But before this she had been the editor of Wood's Magazine, together with Mary Pike who wrote at one time under the signature of "Sydney Hyde", and who, as a young girl, had a most interesting career at The Hague, where her father was the American Minister.
With all this crowded life, her tremendous interest in religion still exceeded every other interest. She seemed to feel it her mission to arouse the church, and a part of the church turned and rent her. But she wrote on just as eagerly. She declared herself quite useless in other directions.
"I never made a pie in my life," she writes to a friend, "nor a shirt, nor a loaf of cake. Nor a pudding, to the best of my knowledge and belief. In fact, the list of things that I never did and never want to, is sublime in its infinity."
Even after the first bloom of youth had gone she still had the charm of freshness. Although her curly lair silvered, yet she never seemed to be growing old. It is difficult to comprehend, in view of her buoyancy and gay temperament, how she could have said, "I can't tell you with what infinite pity I look back upon the unspeakable loneliness and bewilderment of my youth." Nor can one trace it exactly to any fixed period. She certainly in later life never knew what loneliness or dissatisfaction was, but after all the excitements and flatteries of Washington, found herself entirely happy in Hamilton with her adoring sister Augusta, who, in spite of a keen intelligence and dry humor, never showed for what she was worth, because, as a friend said, "she always stood round admiring Gail." When asked if she were not lonely in Hamilton, Gail wrote in reply:
"We do have the best of company. Swinburne has been down here for three weeks or so, charming me with his choruses, and Mill is always here at call, which is about once a year. He is a great rest and solace and hope to me. I have a call every evening from Louis Napoleon, but I cannot say I find him very entertaining, but he brings a very charming companion, -- one About. In fact, it would take me a long while just to name the people who come to see me, and who talk their very best in my society."
To Miss Palfrey, who wrote her that she found it a lonely thing to live to seventy years, she replied:
"Not lonely if you could only see and feel the great crowd of witnesses who I believe can see and feel you, -- the best beloved grown more loving, the clear-sighted seeing now though all the mists and fogs of earth into the very penetralia of your love and gratitude, knowing you infinitely better than they ever knew you before, and longing to comfort you with their recognition, let alone all new joys and new purposes, which are to make your life go from glory to glory."
Elsewhere Gail wrote: "This life is beautiful only so far as it is transparent and lets the other upper ether through." It certainly was transparent with her.
She had remodeled and refurnished the house in Hamilton, and made it exceedingly pleasant, and there she had many little companies of delightful and distinguished people, all enlivened by Gail's drollery and caprice and gayety.
Once, when I was in great trouble, she came to me, with her sister, for many weeks, and if she did not turn mourning into joy she brought sunshine into gloom. She often came afterwards, and filled the house with the "inextinguishable laughter of the gods." Whenever she came, the wind and the sun seemed to come in with her, so bright and breezy was her presence.
She was past fifty, and had just recovered from a four months' siege of bronchitis, when what had been the dream of her girlhood was realized, and she went abroad to join Mr. and Mrs. Blaine and some members of their family. "We had two days of fog," she wrote. "You may be sure I relegated the command of this vessel to no one during those two days. I took charge myself." The party traversed France, Italy, and regions of Germany, Switzerland, England, and Scotland.
Nothing escaped her. She climbed Vesuvius in a divine curiosity looking down the crater, with its boiling and heaving commotion. "It is like seeing a world in the making," she said. All the beauty of cathedral and palace she made her own, -- the home of Galileo, the paintings of the Uffizi, the marbles of the Vatican, the charm of Naples, of Sorrento, the ineffable delight of Venice, the wonder and awe of the Alps, the long landscapes of France, the shops of Paris, the greenness of England and the loveliness of her homes, the mists of Scotland. But she looked on everything from the point of view of her entirely original personality. She enjoyed every moment, and especially Mr. Carnegie's coaching trip through England, and the life at Cluny Castle.
One morning there it was raining in sheets and torrents, as if it had never rained before, and as it was impossible to fish or shoot or walk, it was resolved to remain housed, and that each individual should do something for the entertainment of all. Mr. Carnegie told an incident of his career unknown before; Mr. Blaine a Congressional incident that once had been a secret; Walter Damrosch played the Fire-music; and then Gail's turn came. "I will show you," she said, "one of the most satisfactory and charming things of its sort you ever saw in your lives, provided you guess what it is!" They were fresh from manuscripts and missals and marvels of book-binding, from old jewel-work, and ivory triptyches, and Venetian glass, -- of course they could guess. They remembered the old game. To what kingdom did it belong? To all. Pshaw! But does it, for instance, belong to the animal kingdom? Of course. But if it belongs to all, it must belong to the vegetable, too. Partly! Oh, it was an orchid, then. Nothing of the sort. But partly? Can a thing belong to more than one kingdom? This thing does. Is it in the mineral, then? Certainly. - All three kingdoms! It would not be surprising if the spiritual were added. By all means the spiritual. Has it any color, possibly only white? White in a degree. Or pink? In some degree. It is a chameleon! Nonsense! Is it large? Not too large. Tall? It reaches to the heart. Is it the little Fra Angelico -- the Sèvres cup? One may be brazen, but one is notmade of gold! How did I come by it? That is irrelevant; but I stood in great awe of the people who put it in my hands. It is a rosary blessed by the Pope. No? Then it must be that wonderful illuminated Bible. No, my own Bible is full of illumination. And so the guessing went on. A great financier, a great statesman, a great musician, to say nothing of others, and all such poor guessers!
Out of sight Gail hurried and came back with her new Paris bonnet in hand. "Confess," she said, "you never saw anything more satisfactory in its way. Here are all the kingdoms of the earth, as I said. The silk, the plumes for one, the wires, the pins for another, the lace, the straw, for a third, and as for the spiritual, I trust the frame in which I shall wear that bonnet up the broad aisle of the meeting-house in Hamilton will answer for it."
When the gayety had subsided, a footman took the bonnet away. And then the rain ceased, the sun came out, and all dispersed on their various errands. When at night dinner was announced, and the party went out, preceded by the gillies blowing the Scottish tunes on their pipes as they puffed and swayed down the gallery and to the castle dining hall, there on the top of the epergne on the dinner table, above the blaze of gold and silver and crystal, above the flowers, the fruit, the 'frolic wine', like a bouquet of flowers, perched Gail's lovely Paris bonnet, the chief ornament of the lairds' dinner table.
After her return from Europe and a happy season at home, she was again in Washington, and on this visit she had her celebrated Bible Class. Mr. Blaine was then Secretary of State, adding luster to the high office, and Mrs. Blaine, nearly heartbroken through the death of her oldest son and daughter, yet still seeking for the truth, gave her drawing-room for the class. The wife of the President, the wife of the Vice-president, "both houses of Congress, the circles of science, of literature, of education, of diplomacy, sent their delegates. Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, Unitarianism, Episcopacy, were ably and amiably represented, and never more agreeably than when, in Horatian phrase, beautiful daughters came with their more beautiful mothers. The English church and the Greek church bent to each other with stately courtesy. The Quaker faith was there, robed according to the last dainty imported touch of the children of this world, but with all the gentle aspect and saintly bearing of George Fox and the Whittiers, brother and sister. Ignatius Loyola and Jonathan Edwards sat side by side in French costume of faultless cut and wonderful combination; and one had danced no more lightly or deeply into Saturday night than the other. Young Radicalism found the texts for old Orthodoxy; and both smiled approval whenever the sword of the Spirit slipped in between the loosened joints of Error's gaping armor. All came together, not to advocate any theory or repel any doctrine whatever, but to learn for themselves what the Bible teaches." The rest of Gail's account of this marvelous gathering is one of the wittiest and pleasantest recitals that I know.
And then, in the middle of his splendid work of uniting all the Americas, Mr. Blaine's great career was ended. Gail's affection for him had been deep and her faith in him was unbounded. She wrote to him once, "Blessed are you whom men reviled and persecuted and said all manner of evil against falsely for His name's sake -- because you stood alone upright when the others bent before the blast, because in the Credit Mobilier you not only had not taken, but testified that you attached no blame to Oakes Ames in the proffer -- when others would have made a scapegoat you claimed that he was as innocent as any other member of the flock -- because in the Little Rock and Fort Smith matter you denied nothing, never struck to the storm, but stoutly, and defiantly, and splendidly, and heaven-wide, asserted your absolute right to do exactly what you did, -- because when the whole North went after President Hayes, you alone in Congress stood by your faith as firmly as before you stood by moderation and justice when the extremists wanted the Force Bill! Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for of such is the Kingdom of heaven, if I have the least glimpse of what the prophets and apostles mean." Since she so intimately knew his goodness and sweetness and courage, the real grandeur of his nature, she was asked by his family to write his biography.
She went then, with her sister, to the place of his birth, tracing his footsteps, gathering material and working assiduously, and with her heart in her work, for two years. She had completed all but the last chapter, and was in Washington again, when early one morning she felt it had become dark, and that she was slowly sinking to the floor. It was a stroke of paralysis. She failed to rally, and it was thought she could not recover, every breath seeming destined to be her last. As the publisher was in the house clamoring for the book, I was urged by her sister Augusta and by Mrs. Blame to go to Washington and finish the chapter, which rather unwillingly I did, although it was necessary to do hardly more than put her notes together. It was a great disappointment to Gail, after her recovery, not to have completed the work herself, -- although virtually she did so, -- but she generously expressed her pleasure and satisfaction in what I had done.
I have always thought that the paralysis was largely occasioned by the intensity of her effort in behalf of Mrs. Maybrick, -- a woman who was found guilty on slight evidence, and by a judge who became insane shortly after, if indeed, as it has been thought, he was not already so, of administering arsenic to her husband, who had been for years a confirmed arsenic-eater. Gail moved heaven and earth in behalf of the unfortunate lady, with petitions signed by the leading women of this country, by interviews with Supreme Court Justices, by addresses to the Queen, and by incessant correspondence with people of authority, and it is more than probable that the feverish interest and work wrought her great injury.
After many weeks she was able to be moved to Hamilton, and there, to the surprise of all, she regained health and strength enough to write and herself publish the small book entitled "X Rays", in which she recounted her spiritual experience during the time she lay unconscious and, as it were, between two worlds. She had a year and a half of much happiness, surrounded by friends, with her mind clear and strong. Then suddenly one morning the summons came, and, after a few hours of complete unconsciousness again, the great white soul passed to discover the truth she had so eagerly sought here.
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THERE was nothing in Mary Booth's childhood and youth to give promise of the brilliant woman of the world and of business that she became; and there was everything in her studious, absent-minded, and shy behavior to foretell the delicate beauty of the poetic nature that made her later companionship precious to people of scholarship, of sentiment, and of genius. Wrapped in her books and the thoughts and fancies they suggested, she seemed utterly unable to cope with the matter-of-fact affairs of common life; and even after she had attained her high journalistic position and national fame, and by her individual effort had accumulated a fortune, her father could never quite believe her able to take care of herself, but frequently made her presents of money, lest she should find herself needing it.
It was fortunate for her that her father was a student and scholar himself, being for the greater part of his life a teacher, and was thus capable of overseeing her education, which was of a very complete character. She was not only conversant with several of the exact sciences, but was well acquainted with Latin, and was mistress of the French, German, and Italian languages, all of which she spoke and wrote with ease. She may have inherited her business talent from her father, who had so well managed his resources as to make himself a man of comfortable property before her birth, and there was never any time in her early life when her purse was not well supplied by him. He had an immense pride in her; and after she began to publish, he kept all her books and every scrap of her writing as so many treasures. There was always a delightful comradeship between herself and her father. "He is a good and t